Strange Fruit

"Strange Fruit, first performed by Billie Holiday in 1939, condemning American racism, was the first time you had a really clear protest message in a song which was performed in nightclubs amid a set of songs which weren’t political. Well, they were confronted with an issue that they maybe weren’t expecting. Before, there was a tradition that the folk singer Woody Guthrie represented – songs from the labour movement which started with the International Workers of the World. Those were songs that were very much designed to be sung by anybody. They were handed down not in records but in song books. They were basically propaganda. This song is art. So much is about the arrangement and the emotion in Billie Holiday’s performance. My interest in writing my book was what happens when protest meets pop music. Yes, but it also creates more friction and complexity. Some people didn’t want that kind of message in their pop music. All the debates which animate the book start there. Yes, I read Strange Fruit when I was working on the proposal. I had heard about it before and it intrigued me because it is subtitled “the biography of a song”. And what I was trying to do was tell the story of a moment in history through each song. This book does it so well. It is such a brilliant, lean telling of that moment from lots of different angles. You get Billie Holiday’s biography, but also he interviewed a lot of people who had heard the song at the time, many of whom are now dead. Those interviews sparked so many ideas for me about the different perceptions and the ways people responded. You would expect them to be saying it was an amazing piece of art and a ground-breaking song, but actually lots of them felt it was very simplistic and not a very good piece of music. For some it ruined their Saturday nights, it wasn’t what they came out to hear. There aren’t that many books which are about just one song, and show that the song is a pinhole through which you can see all these characters and issues. It was hugely influential and so thorough that I had to do quite a lot of other reading to make sure that all of my material about [the song] Strange Fruit didn’t come from this book. It is one of those books that you wish you hadn’t read because it is so good on its subject."