Customer Reviews

Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song

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I was glad to see the announcement for this book, an essay on Billie Holiday's landmark song, "Strange Fruit." Margolick does a good job of describing the song's origins, its performance by Holiday and its initial reception by audiences and critics.

Unfortunately, there is little analysis of the song's impact on the African-American community or on American society in general. While the narrative is presented well, the commentary is often superficial: "Some African Americans...disliked the song because it portrayed blacks as victims. Others literally feared the song, thinking that far from enlightening people, it would stir up racial hatreds and actually lead to a new wave of lynchings." But which of the many views was dominant? Margolick provides some educated guesses but no real evidence. We see how the song affected particular individuals but not how it influenced the cause of civil rights.

Moreover, the purpose and scope of the book are never made clear. As a biographical essay, STRANGE FRUIT omits much of the context we would need to understand Holiday and her life. As a social commentary, it fails to marshal evidence in a cogent or convincing way. The author presents no critical evaluation of the song itself, and the book is ultimately more a tribute than anything else.

The unusual length of the book also makes it hard to categorize. It's more than a conventional essay yet less than a full-length biography. While the comments of those who knew Holiday are generally interesting, Margolick's attempts to synthesize the material -- to make sense of it all -- often seem forced, incomplete or even contradictory.

STRANGE FRUIT is strangely unsatisfying. Readers who want to understand the song's impact will be left wanting additional evidence and a more thoughtful commentary.

There are few songs in the world that stop you in your tracks and render you speechless of mind and heart. Billie Holiday sang one of them. The combination of her signature smoky vocals and the stark lyrics of the song written by Abel Meeropol, a white Jewish schoolteacher in the Bronx, proved to be spellbinding. Its emotional charge stirred activists and intellectuals and even popular notoriety. Margolick's biography of the song is a slim volume but full of interest, well-written and researched.

'Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song' does a great job of dispelling the myths about the song and pinpointing the truth about one of the most famous American songs of the 20th century. Not only that but it also does a great job at pin-pointing why the song still has a shroud of mystery about it, and how it impacted generations of African-Americans and whites.
It seems like a bit of light reading, but since the song is an important one, the book is a gem.

If you've poked around enough online to know the real story of the writing of the song "Strange Fruit", and are more than a passing fan of Billie Holiday, then there's really nothing new here for you. This is a very slight volume, and about half way through I found myself annoyed that the author just seemed to be finding as many different ways as possible to give us variations on the themes -- "Billie was very emotionally drained by performing this song" and "Audiences frequently didn't know how to take it." Don't be fooled by the page length, either -- a good chunk of that at the back is padded by a discography of performers who have recorded the song. It's a useful reference but, again, nothing that you couldn't find by searching for the song on Amazon or any other music site. I was expecting more insight about the Café Society crowd, and more biography on the song's author, Abel Meeropol. Instead, it felt like "Lady Sings the Blues for Dummies" combined with a collection of quotes and anecdotes -- again, none of which added to what I already knew.

This book is an elegant portrait of a song, the woman who sang it, and the man who wrote it. It is a poignant look at the interplay between them all.I am not a student of jazz, and yet I found this book to be fascinating. It is as much about civil rights and human dignity as it is about music. Margolick is an amazingly astute observer of events, and he has an uncanny ability to describe what he sees in beautiful, elegant prose. This book would make a wonderful gift to anyone interested in jazz; interested in the civil rights movement; interested in Billie Holiday; or just interested in a little known profile in courage. Read it and savor it!

I found myself enjoying this book a lot more than I thought I would. I recommended it to a few of my friends.

The book has an introduction by Hilton Als. In early 1939 Billie Holiday sang "Strange Fruit." It made the audience nervous. Someone clapped and then everyone clapped at the night club, Cafe Society.

Billie Holiday performed the song countless times. The song encountered great resistance. It was banned by South African Radio during the existence of apartheid. The song was written by a white Jewish school teacher from New York City, Abel Meeropol, writing under the pen name Lewis Allan. He is better known as the adoptive father of the sons of the Rosenbergs. He brought the song to Billie Holiday.

Billie Holiday embellished things in her ghost-written autobiography. Cafe Society was the brainchild of Barney Josephson. Meeropol felt that Billie Holiday was not comfortable with the song. Josh White also performed the song.

Lynching was a conspicuous theme in black fiction, theater, and art, but not in music. Lynching brutalized feelings everywhere. The U.S. Congress refused over and over again to pass an anti-lynching law. The performance on record is elegant and understated. There was a sense of inherent drama in a Billie Holiday presentation. The record sold ten thousand copies the first week by some accounts. The song made one sit up and listen and think. Hearing the record was an epic event for the fifteen year old Ned Rorem.

The title of the song was used by Lillian Smith for her anti-segregation novel. When Billie Holiday moved to the other jazz clubs "Strange Fruit" went over well. The book is part oral history. The collage style is effective. When Billie Holiday was depressed she added "Strange Fruit" to the program.

In the American mainstream "Strange Fruit" was too sensitve to sing. The song made its way into a song book used by Pete Seeger and other folk singers. The song was learned by a number of the red diaper babies of the 1950's era. Nina Simone performed the song in the 1960's. The book contains a 'Strange Fruit" discography.

Strange Fruit : The Biography of a Song by David Margolick, Hilton Als, moved me! I think Margolick did a great job of ferreting out and marrying an extensive array of first person accounts of people's experiences listening to Billie Holiday sing her heartbreaking ballad, enough so that I almost felt like I was there too at times! Margolick doesn't pretend his book is a historical analysis - it's a biography, and a short one at that. As such, it does it's job and will resonate with me, as does Billie's song. It would be to the historians that I would look for analysis of its effects on society - anyone listening? The book adds another layer of fine patina to an historical moment in musical history and illustrates how brave Billie Holiday must have been!