Blood roots
An S.F. Jewish Film Festival doc revisits "Strange Fruit" 's origins.

By Johnny Ray Huston

'BITTER CROP' If Billie Holiday had her way, the last two words of "Strange Fruit" would have been the title of her autobiography, instead of Lady Sings the Blues. In the book, Holiday claims she helped write "Strange Fruit"; on a 1951 live recording, she introduces the song by saying, "It was written especially for me." As a peerless interpretive singer, Holiday made many songs – including "Strange Fruit" – her own, but "Strange Fruit" is the only one she (coauthor of the great "God Bless the Child") claimed to have authored that in fact she hadn't. Lies reveal truth, and the truth revealed by Holiday's lie is a richly ambiguous one.

Joel Katz's new documentary, Strange Fruit, focuses on the man who actually composed the song, Abel Meeropol. Public school American history books should list Meeropol, a public school teacher himself, as a 20th-century hero. The author of thousands of lesser-known compositions, Meeropol also – along with his wife, Anne, who was perhaps the first person to sing "Strange Fruit" – raised the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. His musical pseudonym, Lewis Allan, combines the names of his and Anne's two natural-born children, neither of whom survived infancy.

When Doubleday first published Lady Sings the Blues, an angered Meeropol made the publisher pledge to correct the book's "mistakes" about the authorship of "Strange Fruit." But according to David Margolick's recent book Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society and an Early Cry for Civil Rights, he wasn't angry at Holiday herself. The inference is that Meeropol understood why Holiday made her claim of authorship. A great song doesn't just tell a story; it inspires many stories, and this inferred bond – one involving Black-Jewish history and experience – is one of the countless stories attached to "Strange Fruit."

Katz's documentary makes a similar inference. It begins and ends with "a pastoral scene of the gallant South." Not a historic photograph of a lynching – such as the horrific picture that motivated Meeropol to write "Strange Fruit" – but contemporary shots of a serene green field, with no human activity in sight. It's a vision designed to provoke memory – absence creating a presence in the imagination – and Katz connects it to recent examples of American lynch-mob mentality: the murders of Amadou Diallo, James Byrd Jr., and (somewhat problematically) Matthew Shepard.

Throughout Strange Fruit, Robby and Michael Meeropol articulately discuss their father's life and legacy. Abbey Lincoln does a dramatic reading of Meeropol's best-known lyric. Pete Seeger strums a small segment of the song as if that's all he can muster. Cassandra Wilson sings a somewhat monotonous version over the closing credits. But the most riveting moment, unsurprisingly, features Holiday. In a 1958 live TV appearance, with next to no accompaniment, she battles "Strange Fruit." She rhymes "pluck" and "suck" with maximum violence. She stretches the word "drop" into the shocked cry of someone witnessing a body fall from tree to ground; when she rips at the final, bitter word – "crop" – it's as if the land she's standing on is stained with blood. It's American land, even if she's in a British television studio.

Those were Holiday's "Strange Fruit" trademarks, uncharacteristically broad, dramatic diva gestures quite at odds with the subtle spontaneity, the playful irony, the intelligence and instinct she used to transform love songs into "classics" and "standards." What distinguishes the 1958 performance in Katz's documentary from other Holiday interpretations of "Strange Fruit" (even ones from a few years earlier) is the sarcasm and disgust she brings to Meeropol's mock-idyllic pastoral scene. In Blues Histories and Black Feminism, Angela Davis angrily attacks biographers and jazz-biz figures who claim Holiday initially didn't understand Meeropol's lyric. If people think Holiday wrote "Strange Fruit," it isn't because she said she wrote it; they think she wrote the lyric because she understood it all too well. 'Strange Fruit' plays Tues/30, Castro Theatre, S.F.; Sun/4, 6:45 p.m. Wheeler Auditorium, UC Berkeley, Berk. See First Runs, in Film listings, for show times.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival