Jazz

24 HOLIDAY, Billie. Original 7-inch acetate disc of “Strange Fruit”. New York: Commodore Records, 1939 “it still depresses me every time i sing it … but i have to keep singing it” Remarkable survival from a turning point in Lady Day’s career, an original acetate from the recording session of 20 April 1939, which saw her consign to disc one of her most haunting and unforgettable recordings, “Strange Fruit”, a sombre lament about a lynching and the song which she described as “my personal protest”. With a superb provenance: from the collection of bandleader Artie Shaw. Billie joined Shaw in 1938 and was one of the first Black vocalists to be featured with an all-white band. “Shaw wanted to launch a new band with Billie because he believed she was better than any singer he had ever heard. When he learned that she had left Count Basie’s band, he immediately drove through the night, from Boston to her mother’s place in New York to ask her to join his outfit … Shaw’s was not the first white band to use a black singer – Jimmy Dorsey’s band had June Richmond, and Claude Thornhill recorded with Maxine Sullivan. But Shaw meant to tour with her not just as a band singer, or an equal to the other band members, but as a star” (Szwed, p. 202). Their tour of the South was fraught with danger, and Szwed describes it as a “crazed freedom ride before its time”. We understand that Shaw later passed the disc to a recording engineer, who put it up for auction. The annotations on the label have been identified as being in the hand of Milt Gabler, owner of Commodore Records. In March–April 1939 Holiday was appearing at Café Society, an integrated Greenwich Village club owned by impresario Barney Josephson. Josephson was approached by a Jewish school teacher from the Bronx called Abel Meeropol, who said he had a new song adapted from his own poetry. Meeropol, who wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Allen, was at that time a member of the Communist Party of America, and was inspired to write “Strange Fruit” (originally entitled “Bitter Fruit”) after seeing images of the lynching of two Black youths taken in Marion, Indiana, in 1930. Josephson gave Meeropol the nod and he set the words to music with assistance from his wife, Anne, and a singer, Laura Duncan. Billie performed it at the club with some trepidation, as she describes in Lady Sings the Blues, “I worked like the devil on it because I was never sure I could put it across or that I could get across to a plush night-club audience

the things that it meant to me. I was scared people would hate it. The first time I sang it I thought it was a mistake and I had been right being scared. There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping … The version I recorded for Commodore became my biggest-selling record. It still depresses me every time I sing it, though … But I have to keep singing it”. Record producer John Hammond, who had discovered Billie, didn’t like the song and later wrote that, “artistically the worst thing that ever happened to her was the overwhelming success of … Strange Fruit … the more conscious she was of her style, the more mannered she became” (cited in Denning, p. 324). In addition, Columbia, apparently fearful of antagonizing Southern customers, refused to record it. However, Hammond gave permission for Billie to record with Milt Gabler’s Commodore Records. In his acclaimed study of the song and its milieu, David Margolick cites tenorist Kenneth Hollon, who was present at the date, as saying that the recording of “Strange Fruit” took four hours to complete, because Gabler “wanted to get a great one out there”. And it became a turning point for her because it took her “out of the juke joints” (Friedwald, p. 225). African-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips notes that “the song was revolutionary, not only because of the explicit nature of the lyrics, but because it effectively reversed the black singer’s relationship with a white audience … with this song Billie Holiday found a means by which she could demand that the audience stop and listen to her, and she was able to force them to take on board something they were uncomfortable with” (Phillips). At the session at World Broadcasting Studio at 711 Fifth Avenue, Billie was accompanied by the Café Society Band: Frankie Newton (trumpet), Tab Smith (alto / soprano), Kenneth Hollon, Stanley Payne (tenor), Sonny White (piano), Jimmy McLin (guitar), John Williams (bass), Eddie Dougherty (drums). Billie had just turned 24. 7-inch acetate disc, grooves on one side only, additional drive-pin hole in centre, typed label (Holiday’s name misspelled as “Billy” and corrected in black ballpoint pen), annotated in black ballpoint pen with session details: “Commodore Record 26, recorded 4/20/39, Frankie Newton orchestra, produced by Milt Gabler”; original plain sleeve (rather tattered). A few light abrasions otherwise very good. ¶ Will Friedwald, A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers , 2010; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century , 1998; David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday and the Biography of a Song , 2001; Caryl Phillips, Colour me English , 2011; John Szwed, Billie Holiday: The Musician & The Myth, 2015. £12,500 [145458]

JAZZ

All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk

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