How 'Strange Fruit' Killed Billie Holiday

[babylonsister]

How ‘Strange Fruit’ Killed Billie Holiday
by Brandon Weber
February 20, 2018

snip//

Southern trees bear 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

At times, her performance of the song was met with fierce pushback. Though many people knew that lynchings of African-Americans in the South were common, there was resistance to ending the practice among Southern whites. Racism, combined with a popular desire to limit federal power over local concerns,kept people in the North from making any successful moves to end lynchings in the South.

In the end, Billie Holiday’s insistence on performing “Strange Fruit” may have been responsible for her demise.

One of the primary attempts to silence her came from a man named Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and an extreme racist, even for the 1930s. As Johann Hari details in Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Anslinger claimed that narcotics made black people forget their place in the fabric of American society, and that jazz musicians were dangerous in particular, creating “Satanic” music under the influence of marijuana.

Holiday, who throughout her career called public attention to the devastating impact of white supremacy, was also a drug user. She drew Anslinger’s notice, and he ordered Holiday to cease performing the song. Holiday refused, and Anslinger ramped up his efforts to silence her.

After one of Anslinger’s men was paid to track Holiday and frame her with buying and using heroin, she spent eighteen months in prison. Upon her release in 1948, the federal government refused to renew her cabaret performer’s license, mandatory for any performer playing or singing at any club or bar serving alcohol.

This utterly undermined her career. Although Holiday was able to perform multiple sold-out Carnegie Hall performances over the next several years, she could no longer travel the nightclub circuit.

Unable to perform regularly at the venues she loved, and to stop remembering a childhood that included being raped at age ten, and working in a brothel with her mother, Holiday eventually began using heroin again. When she checked into a New York hospital in 1959, her liver was failing and cancerous. She was emaciated, and her heart and lungs were compromised. Despite her condition, she didn’t want to stay there. “They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t let them,” she presciently told friends and family.

more...

https://progressive.org/dispatches/strange-fruit-caused-the-murder-of-billie-holiday-180220/?fbclid=IwAR0pEWeczP2QMBB6_Pk73f9wQ64RxNm3Sl1hpqssjT0MwAbcm9Lvg2XZR7s

[Dennis Donovan]

1. Harry Fucking Anslinger...

POS Extrordinaire. Here's his tombstone for those who need to relieve themselves and smile at the same time:

[calimary]

3. Detestable bastard.

[GeoWilliam750]

14. For something really ironic

Anslinger's son was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania.

[Mc Mike]

2. Great woman. She fought them til the end.

If they had beaten her, no need for the guard and the cuffs on her deathbed. They lost.

[Perseus]

4. A unique performer, her style cannot be imitated.

I have so many of her albums and CDs, and never get tired of listening to her.

There is a Norwegian child singer, Angelina Jordan, who comes close to singing like Billy Holiday. She grew up listening to her.

Hear her sing:

[link:

|

[Elwood P Dowd]

8. She also sounds like Dinah Washington

singing "What A Difference A Day Makes".

[Auggie]

9. WOW!!!

[smirkymonkey]

11. She's amazing.

Not the real thing, but pretty damn good for a little white girl.

[Baltimike]

5. that, and the heroin. nt

[WhiskeyGrinder]

6. What kind of erasure is this? "Strange Fruit" did not kill her. Self-medication to deal with trauma

led to addiction, and systemic white supremacy led to her being chained to her bed and Anslinger and his men prohibiting methadone treatment. What a weird victim-blaming take.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

7. Anslinger is also the man responsible for putting marijuana on the same legal level as heroin. n/t

[abqtommy]

10. I see a lot of historic and present instances of race-based injustice here in the home of the brave

and the land of the free. That's what I call reality snark.

[smirkymonkey]

12. One of the most incredible female artists ever to have lived.

She had such a tragic life.

[DemocracyMouse]

13. I hadn't known of these things. My god, she was a saint

[betsuni]

15. K&R