Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society And An Early Cry For Civil Rights

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David Margolick. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society And An Early Cry For Civil Rights

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About the Author

DAVID MARGOLICK is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. Prior to that, he was the national legal affairs correspondent for the NewYork Times. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Stanford Law School. He has written two prior books: Undue Influence: The Epic Battle for the Johnson & Johnson Fortune and At the Bar: The Passions and Peccadillos of American Lawyers, a collection of his law columns for the NewYork Times. Strange Fruit originated as an article in Vanity Fair.

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Café Society was New York's only truly integrated nightclub, a place catering to progressive types with open minds. But Holiday was to recall that even there, she was afraid to sing this new song, a song that tackled racial hatred head-on at a time when protest music was all but unknown, and regretted it—at least momentarily—when she first did. “There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished,” she later wrote in her autobiography. “Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everybody was clapping.”

The applause grew louder and a bit less tentative as “Strange Fruit” became a nightly ritual for Holiday, then one of her most successful records, then one of her signature songs, at least in those places where it was safe to perform. For throughout Holiday's short life—she died in 1959 at the age of forty-four—the song existed in a kind of artistic quarantine: it could travel, but only to selected places. And in the forty years since her death, audiences have continued to applaud, respect, and be moved by this disturbing ballad, unique in Holiday's oeuvre and in the repertoire of American music, as it has left its mark on generations of writers, musicians, and other listeners, both black and white, in America and throughout the world.

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