"Strange Fruit" - Billie Holiday

On Changing the Narrative

Billie Holiday was the face of civil rights and the victim of the racist war on drugs.

NPR called her a “great talent” who “courted her own doom.” The U.K. Times referred to her as a “genius set on self-destruction.” The lives of few artists are more mythologized than Billie Holiday. Partly that’s because her story doesn’t fit neatly into any historical plotline. It hinges on opposites — a regal First Lady of Jazz and a criminalized addict. Hers was the face of both the Civil Rights Movement and the war on drugs.

When writing about Holiday's legacy, our first task is correcting for the countless headlines that depict her downfall as self-inflicted. Calling Holiday a “great talent who courted her own demise” is reductive imagery that conjures a moth drawn to a white hot flame rather than a butterfly doused in gasoline and set on fire. Yes, Billie Holiday was addicted to alcohol and heroin. But describing her annihilation by its symptoms rather than its cause is to ignore the oppressive systems responsible for her demise. 

 “I’ve been told that nobody sings the word ‘hunger’ like I do. Or the word ‘love.’ All I’ve learned in all those places from all those people is wrapped up in those two words. You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermons on how to behave.”

- excerpt from Holiday’s 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues

Born into extreme poverty by a teenage mother exiled from her familial home for getting pregnant, Billie Holiday, or then Eleanora Fagan, wasn’t afforded a stable childhood. Her musician father left when she was born. Her mother often had to take work out of town and placed her in the care of distant (and abusive) relatives. By the age of 9, she’dd racked up so many absences that she was sentenced to a Catholic reform school. At the age of 10, she was raped by a neighbor. By 13, she had quit school altogether and instead made money cleaning houses and working as a prostitute. She was arrested and sentenced to four months in a notoriously violent prison on what is now known as Roosevelt Island but at the time was nicknamed “Farewell Island” because of its connotation of hopelessness. After her release, Holiday auditioned to sing at a Harlem speakeasy. She took her stage name from her favorite actress Billie Dove and Clarence Halliday, her estranged father.

Holiday quickly became a popular attraction in Harlem’s jazz and blues scene, and her big break came in 1933 when producer John Hammond heard the 18-year-old’s unique voice and financed her first recordings. With the successes of her first few singles and a yearlong gig touring with Count Basie, Holiday was hired by Artie Shaw, making her one of the first Black women to tour the segregated U.S. South with a white orchestra and bandleader — and putting her in the spotlight of racist policies.  In her 1956 autobiography, Holiday describes an incident in which she wasn’t permitted to sit on the bandstand with other vocalists. In the 2021 documentary, Billie, Shaw recalls how white band members were given hotel rooms while Holiday would sleep on the bus. She always ordered an extra hamburger and stuck it in her purse in case a restaurant refused to serve her.

By the late ‘30s, Holiday was an established artist and her single, “I’m Gonna Lock My Heart” was sitting at No. 2 on the pop chart. It was 1939 when she was introduced to a song that would forever alter her career, her life, and her legacy.

 “Strange Fruit,” a haunting protest song about lynching was brought to Holiday by Barney Josephson, owner of New York’s racially integrated nightclub Cafe Society. Despite her fear of retaliation by white audiences, Holiday made the decision to incorporate “Strange Fruit” into her nightly repertoire. “Every song was about love at the time,” says Holiday’s goddaughter in the 2015 book, Chasing the Scream. “And to have a Black woman performing a song about lynching was impossible to imagine.” Sixteen years before Rosa Parks, Holiday's decision to perform “Strange Fruit” in front of white audiences is considered a marker for the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

Holiday couldn’t fully predict the long-term risks of  using her platform to remind America of its shameful and not distant past. She’d be targeted by the government, imprisoned on drug charges, and permanently banned from singing in venues that served alcohol, thus wiping out her main source of income.

She was perceived as a threat to power, and the 2021 film The United States vs. Billie Holiday depicts the systematic annihilation of Holiday’s life and career by the Feds. The movie attempts to make the same point as Chasing the Scream (which inspired the film), that the war on drugs began as a war on minorities, with drugs providing a justification to target and persecute. Harry Anslinger, the director of the newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics, described jazz music as sounding "like the jungles in the dead of night” and said that jazz music got its sound because the musicians were under the influence of drugs.

According to a medical journal from the National Library of Medicine, Anslinger said, “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, results from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others.” After getting nowhere targeting jazz musicians in general, Anslinger narrowed his focus to a single target, Billie Holiday. He set out to expose her heroin addiction and destroy her platform as a celebrity — all while protecting white stars like Judy Garland who also battled with heroin addiction. Rather than arrest Garland, Anslinger convinced executives at MGM to send her to rehab. “I believed her to be a fine woman caught in a situation that could only destroy her.” That mercy was not extended to Holiday. She was sentenced to a year in federal prison and stripped of her license to perform at venues where liquor was sold. 

Holiday would struggle with addiction for the rest of her life. She was diagnosed with cirrhosis, her health began to deteriorate, and she checked into a hospital for treatment. Narcotics police went to her hospital room, claiming they had found heroin in her home. A grand jury was summoned to indict her, and she was arrested, handcuffed to her bed, and placed under police guard. According to Chasing the Scream, methadone treatment for withdrawal symptoms was discontinued after 10 days as part of Anslinger's policies. After a month and a half in the hospital, Holiday died on July 17 at the age of 44. 

Although The United States vs. Billie Holiday exposes the institutional racism that accelerated Holiday’s descent into addiction and solidifies her as an early hero of civil rights, the film erases her queerness. For a woman whose addiction stemmed from sexual assault, abusive relationships, and blatant racism, is homophobia not also a symptom of Holiday’s struggle? Holiday famously dated both men and women and one of her most notable relationships was with actress Tallulah Bankhead. It was Bankhead who begged FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who was friend’s with Bankhead’s father, to exonerate Holiday’s charges. Although Bankhead (played by Natasha Lyonne) does make an appearance in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, the tepid treatment of their relationship leaves the audience to assume they were merely close friends. The trailer  shows the two women engaged in a passionate kiss but the scene was cut from the actual film. 

Bankhead and Holiday

Billie Holiday wasn’t a genius who invited her own self-destruction as some headlines would suggest. Her demise didn’t exist in a vacuum of self-indulgence. Holiday's struggle with substance abuse was intricately intertwined with the injustices she survived. The narrative surrounding Holiday's life must be reframed to reflect the systemic oppression that attempted to squelch her legacy.

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