Haley Blazer RCL 137.

H Cynthia Mazzant October 9, 2012 Strange Fruit: An Analysis of Live Performance It is common for a song to become famous because of a catchy melody, or even a clever set of lyrics. And of course, anyone with an attractive enough face or the necessary funds can Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body 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, And 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 a tree to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop. produce a secular hit. But it is far less common for a song to reach main-stream levels of fame because it spurred social change in the face of societal opposition. Uncommon, but not unheard of. Strange Fruit, written by Abel Meeropol, preformed most famously by jazz singer Billie Holiday, did just that. By examining footage of Holidays performances, we are invited to

remember the raw power that live performance can hold in its communication with an audience. The song Strange Fruit was made famous by Billie Holiday in 1939, though it was not her own creation. Edwin Moore, writer for The Guardian, details the history of the songs origin. It was written originally in 1936 by Abel Meeropol to protest African American lynchings. At the time, Meeropol was a Jewish English teacher living in New York City and Strange Fruit was a regular twelve-line poem before Meeropol set it to music (web). Without this change, it would never have reached its vast audience in the 1930s, 1940s, and onward. When the quiet melody

Blazer 2 met Holidays haunting voice in 1939, Meeropols work was on the fast-track to reaching a national audience. Since its conception, Strange Fruit has seen many renditions, always bearing the same twelve lines. However, it was Billie Holidays original performances at Caf Society that made shockingly effective use of every stage element to create not just a performance, but an experience for each audience member. In his article titled Strange Fruit, Vanity Fair editor David Margolick describes Caf Society as a the first and only racially integrated New York night club in 1939. It was an atypical, leftist environment dubbed, the wrong place for the right people (web). And this was where Strange Fruit got its startits audience depicted by historian David W. Stowe as a fusion of "labor leaders, intellectuals, writers, jazz lovers, celebrities, students and assorted leftists" (web). New York City, as it always has, holds a reputation for its ability to cater to virtually any crowd. To embrace this quality of the city is to embrace its potential for nourishing modern budding social movements. It worked for Meeropol and Holiday in the 1940s, and it can work the same way now. Holiday was in the ideal setting for introducing Meeropols work at Caf Society. The song itselfthe melody, the lyrics, the instrumental build-upis extremely moving, and Holidays tone is haunting, especially when paired with Meeropols blatant metaphors for racial lynching. In his article, Strange Fruit: The Story of the Song, writer Peter Daniels calls the poetry spare but effective (web). Her Billie felt the power of what she was singing and displayed it to her audience, often struggling to hold back tears by the final verse. Her emotions hung in the din of the crowded room even after the songs final chords were struck. It was a piece with social power, a power that in todays music industry is rare.

Blazer 3 When a song does manage to wield an important message nowadays, it is so often obscured beyond recognition by senseless staging and lighting effects. This is the big difference between Billie Holidays rendition of Strange Fruit in the 1940s and Lady Gaga performing in a dress made entirely out of raw meat. Holiday's portrayal of Strange Fruit matched the message it sent. Each night that she preformed the song at Cafe Society, the owner, Barney Josephson, required her to do it a certain way: she had to close with it for all her shows, the waiters had to stop serving before the first note was played, and all the lights were turned off, save a single pin spotlight illuminating Billies face. She was not allowed to sing an encore. Cutting out all extraneous distractions in this way gave the audience no form of retreat. They were forced to digest the message, or at least to begin to. Thats not to say audience members werent made uncomfortable by the piece; they were. In his Vanity Fair article, David Margolick quotes Holiday herself after one of the first Caf Society performances. "There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished," she said. "Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping" (web). Today we are engrained with an impulse to reject direct messages about controversial subjects. We do it so frequently that we dont even realize it. It happens when we break up one-on-one conversations by sending a text message and when we choose to watch Family Guy on television instead of global news networks. This habit of avoidance is equally present in the presentation of modern musical performance. Consider for a moment a modern concert setting. The performer is engaged in a constant battle for their audiences attention, thrown mercilessly into a sea of blinking cell-phone screens, thriving 4G networks and flashing stage lights. And battle they do. Main-stream musicians like

Blazer 4 Niki Minaj, Rihanna, and the previously mentioned Lady Gaga give modern audiences the flash we crave, backed up by watered-down messages we can digest with minimal mental engagement. How far we have come from the musical integrity Holiday displayed in Strange Fruit, aided solely by a single spotlight, Holidays band, and Meeropols poetry. When we allow ourselves to identify the changes in performance culture that have occurred between Holidays time and our own, and really evaluate them, the power of live entertainment seems virtually nonexistent in the twenty-first century. Think about how this relates to the struggle for arts funding and validation in todays society. Margolick quotes jazz critic Ralph Gleason in his description of Holidays performance: she was a sort of living lyric to the song 'Strange Fruit,' hanging, not on a poplar tree, but on the limbs of life itself (web). Sure there is sometimes a fringy, alternative music scene that reaches a similar level of living their lyrics, but for Billie, it was the main-stream. Daniels tells us that even with the songs unsettling and socially controversial subject-matter, Strange Fruit rose to a level of popularity that landed it in sixteenth place on the pop-charts (web). There is really only one live version of Holiday singing Strange Fruit readily available for viewing on the internet, but it shows all the right things. The frame is cut close to Holidays face, giving the viewer a chance to see the power of emotion in her expressions. She looks close to tears. At the end of the video, Holiday just stands there, next to the piano, looking out. She doesnt smile or do anything to acknowledge the audiences applause. She just stands there, letting the message of Strange Fruit sink in to her own being, and encouraging her audience to do the same.

Blazer 5 Clearly racial lynchings are no longer the prevalent issue they once were in the United States. But one thing we know for certain is that each new generation is guaranteed to usher in a new set of problemsproblems that need to be faced. Today the use of main-stream media and performance technique as a vehicle for social change borders on non-existent. Is it due to a lack of recourses? Have artists grown less talented? Of course not; rather, our collective attention span has shrunk to a new low point. Our lack of mental engagement is met by a lack of sustenance in the modern performance industry, and its hard to say which change came first. When we look at Billie Holidays live performance of Strange Fruit, we are met with everything the modern music industry lacksa powerful message and effective audience communication. Art, like any technologic field, is meant to build upon its success of the past, not to reach a peak and fade away. Let us not forget what great artists like Billie Holiday and Abel Meeropol have taught us, and perhaps art can once more begin living up to its potential.

Blazer 6 Works Cited

Daniels, Peter. "World Socialist Web Site." "Strange Fruit": The Story of a Song. International _____Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), 8 Feb. 2002. Web. 22 Oct. 2012. _____<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/feb2002/frut-f08.shtml>.

Margolick, David. "Strange Fruit." Editorial. Vanity Fair Sept. 1998: n. pag. Lady Day. Vanity _____Fair, 1 Dec. 2007. Web. 22 Oct. 2012. <http://www.ladyday.net/stuf/vfsept98.html>.

Moore, Edwin. "Strange Fruit Is Still a Song for Today." The Guardian. Guardian News and _____Media, 18 Sept. 2010. Web. 22 Oct. 2012. _____<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/18/strange-fruit-song_____today>.