Transcript: Abel Meeropol, Billie Holiday and a Song Born of Protest

Henry Foner: Abel wrote Strange Fruit as a poem. It was originally published in the Teacher’s Union publication, and later became the song.

Bernie Kassoy: It was some time in the late 30s.

Honey Kassoy: That’s right, we heard Strange -

Bernie Kassoy: -or the middle thirties -

Honey Kassoy: - no

Bernie Kassoy: - because I was…I’m sorry

Honey Kassoy: It was written in the late thirties. Whenever those first performances were at the Teachers Union, this was the kind of thing that when you heard you couldn’t applaud at first, it was just so, so gripping.

Henry Foner: I describe Abel a pioneer. The fact that he could write the song that really became the anthem on lynching, and that it should come from the pen of a Jewish writer, I think is very significant and is symbolic of that period.

Michael Meeropol: My father was most proud of strange Fruit, of all the things he did. He was most proud of that.

Robby Meeropol: He was a very gentle man, and a very humorous person, who was really not comfortable in public. He was ill at ease, but he felt things very deeply, and very passionately,

Man 3: And he saw a photograph of a lynching, and it then inspired him to write the poem. Maybe it was all up here [points at head] but he said a picture inspired it.

Narrator: Café society’s publicist hears Strange Fruit performed at one of the theater arts theater cabarets. He subsequently arranges a meeting at Café Society between Barney Josephson, Able Meeropol and Billie Holliday. Meeropol plays the song for Holiday, and with encouragement from Josephson, she agrees to perform it. It is February 1939.

Jeff Melnick: One of the amazing things for me about Meeropol writing Strange Fruit and getting it to Billy Holliday – and then having it last the way it has, this song of racial protest – is not that a Jewish person got a Jewish-written song to a black performer, because that had been going on for decades at that point, but that the terms of that meeting were so different that they had ever been before.

Don Byron: There’s this sense of the Jewish American being the middleman between the public, which has limited tolerance for blacks as a people, but kind of likes some of the cultural products of it, and the people and the culture and the music of black America, which kind of makes Strange Fruit really different. It’s really different because what this Jewish American musician is being a middleman for is something quite militant.

Jeff Melnick: The truly new thing about Strange Fruit is that it was really about popular front politics, about finding ways to give voice to racial protest, to social opposition to the dominant order, which none of the songwriters had previously touched on.

Don Byron: It’s the first step away from entertainment and towards expressing something a little more harder-edged, more true to the negative side of being black and living in America