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STRANGE FRUIT Send This Review to a Friend
Joel Katz's remarkable documentary "Strange Fruit" is only 57 minutes long but within that time framework he manages to give us a fascinating amount of musical, social and racial history related to the song that struck a blow against lynching. He also provides one segment that alone is worth the experience--Billie Holiday singing the song all the way through in 1958 with the power that nobody else could approach.
Katz is sensitive to the context in which the song gained its prominence. For one thing, he sets the record straight. It was Abel Meeropol who under the professional name of Lewis Allan wrote the music and words, first a poem. Here was a Jewish-American writing a protest song against the lynching of African-Americans, and Katz is mindful of the impact of the ties between Jews and blacks in times before more rocky relations, and the inclusion of these dynamics provide a message of contemporary relevance.
Katz demonstrates that Meeropol wrote the song before it was ever shown to Holiday, but that she gave the impression it was written especially for her. It is true that her performance of the song made it an anthem against lynching and accounted for its force and popularity, even though radio stations banned its playing in the racist atmosphere of the late 1930s and the 1940s (Holiday first sang "Strange Fruit" in 1939 at Barney Josephson's Café Society in Greenwich Village.)
Yet another fascinating part of the film is the recognition of Meeropol and his wife Anne as the parents who adopted the orphaned sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, whose 1953 execution on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage despite their pleas of innocence and world-wide appeals for clemency still reverberates with controversy. Some of the film's most moving moments come when Michael and Robert Meeropol, while also referring to their birth parents, talk affectionately of Abel Meeropol as their father and reveal much about his personality, his intellect, his humor and the way he and Anne Meeropol raised them. There is also disclosure of Meeropol's anger when his "The House I Live In," another famous number he wrote under Lewis Allan and recorded by Frank Sinatra, had a white-black racial harmony portion edited out in the Sinatra film short in which he sang it.
Katz has done a yeoman job researching the subject and providing film clips that bring the material entertainingly and movingly alive. Comments by singer and actress Abbey Lincoln add immeasurably, as do those by folksinger and activist Pete Seeger and others. This is a rich film that adds to our knowledge and provides a sense of the past when many on the left, Communists included, were crusading against the horrendous racism that resulted in a wave of lynching. It is part of history, and so is this remarkable song, with its lyrics written by a Jewish-American who was a schoolteacher in the Bronx, lyrics beginning "Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood on the root/Black body swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." To hear Holiday sing it can send a chill down your spine. U.S. theatrical premiere at the Film Forum.
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