‘Strange Fruit’: That bitter taste lives on

On Tuesday, 26 May, BBC Radio 4’s Soul Music series featured Billie Holliday’s moving recording of Strange Fruit. It is a blood chilling performance of a song which highlighted the lynching of black people in the US south.

Although recorded in 1939, it was written as a poem two years earlier by a Jewish communist, Abel Meeropol. Since then, dozens of singers have covered it, but none of them have come close to matching her hauntingly angry, pained delivery. For good reason, Time magazine in 1999 named her version the ‘song of the century’.

Soul Music used interviews with relatives of the victims to describe the widespread use of lynching by white southerners venting their visceral hatred of black people, who for just whistling at a white woman, could be dragged from their families, beaten, shot and hung from the bows of trees, the whole disgusting murderous ritual watched by scores of white residents including children.

The descriptions of the lynchings by victims’ relatives were dignified and without rancour, expressing a bewildered puzzlement that human beings could act so reprehensively. Most horrifying were their readings of the reports of the lynchings in local papers which justified the murders, describing the white male perpetrators as ‘determined’, the black victims as ‘fiends’. I cannot imagine the revulsion felt by black readers of these papers in the face of such unrelenting, unreasoned hate.

It would be good to end this piece by saying that the situation has improved in the US…I don’t know, I’ve not visited the South. As a youngster, like thousands of British soul fans, I adored the mixed heritage bands recording in Memphis and Muscle Shoals producing the most fantastic music. I was encouraged that Booker T headed the MGs who included Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn, and singers such as Otis Reading and Wilson Pickett were backed by, and led, mixed bands. But that idealism is long past, slowly diluted by every racist act in the US that gets reported here in the UK.

Today, the shooting of young black males by US policemen, the huge numbers of black people in US jails, the institutionalised racism in the criminal justice system and the economic deprivation suffered by the those living in impoverished ghettos, cannot be hidden by the facile, tokenistic impression of an integrated society so dishonestly concocted by US tv programme and movie makers.

It was against this current background that the assessment of Strange Fruit was so utterly depressing.

Paul Hensby