Billie Holiday, Singer of "Strange Fruit"
Music Moved Me Last Night
Last night, I saw perhaps the two most powerful vocal performances I have ever witnessed. But before we get into that, let's talk Grammy's, which is not where I saw the performances which moved me so much.
Outkast won album of the year for Speakerboxx/The Love Below, and both Antoine and Andre performed their signature hits live. Outkast pretty much blew up last night into cross-cultural mega-stars, one of those nights when it becomes so obvious who the big winner is going to be that the presenters who were reading the nominees for album of the year openly cheered for them before the award was given. Or was Carlos Santana just hopping on the bandwagon?
It was a strange grammy night, but a pretty entertaining one until they hit the award show Bataan Death March from 10:00 to 10:45. A full 20 minutes was devoted a funk jam including Earth, Wind and Fire (?), Outkast, Robert Randolph and the Family Band (who kicked my ass), and George Clinton. This was definitely not your parents' Grammy Awards.
Among many observations...
Is there a more beautiful woman on the planet right now than Beyonce? I mean, damn. I also had no idea she was only 22. Her music doesn't do a whole lot for me, but Beyonce can most certainly sing, as can Christina Aguilera. Compare them to Britney Spears, who you can barely hear over the army of backup singers and voice effects, and I think it's clear which one of those young divas might not have the staying power. I think Britney's a pretty decent actor with screen presence, and I think if she's going to have any career at all 10 years from now, it will be there rather than in music.
I wonder what Kurt Cobain would have thought about seeing Dave Grohl and Chick Corea together? It worked well. What an odd career Dave Grohl has had.
I have resisted Justin Timberlake, but I can understand why the guy is a big star. His voice is legit, and I loved seeing him play the old-school organ in the duet with the jazz trumpet guy I whose name I can't remember. I also love that his mom was flashing the most cleavage of anybody on the entire broadcast.
Richard Marx looks exactly the same as he did 15 years ago.
Jack White is a badass with no regard for subtlety or restraint when he gets his guitar thing on. And I don't care what anybody says, Meg White is really cute.
Was 50 Cent just being an ass when he walked onstage when Evanescence beat him out for the Newcomer award, or was he just genuinely confused?
I liked the Police, and even Sting's first solo album, but when is he going to go away? Do you think he even gets a little embarrassed about singing Roxanne yet again on a broadcast?
The Grammy's were great, overall. It's nice to see an actual event with performances and drama and mixtures of old and new. Watching Outkast's performances and seeing them accept their album award, I had the feeling I was watching a historical moment in the context of popular music.
After watching 3 and a half hours of interesting performances, you'd think that would be enough for me to call it a night. But then Friend of Pipeline Cliff came over, and one thing led to another...
Cliff had a copy of the last Johnny Cash album, which comes with the video for "Hurt" on DVD. I've heard so much about the video, but I hadn't seen it before last night. Before we started to watch it, Cliff said he's seen people cry after watching it. Count me as one of those people. The list of artistic statements I have seen that can impact me in such an emotional way is a short one, indeed. It's just a hard video to watch, of a man who knows he's at the end. All the footage of Cash in his younger days, of him looking at his boyhood home, of him with his recently-deceased wife in younger days...it's just very powerful. People had told me about it, but until I saw it I really couldn't grasp how plain and real the imagery is.
Would the video have the impact it has had it not coincided so closely with June Carter Cash or Johnny Cash's deaths? Yes and no. Make no mistake, it is a powerful statement in its own right. Whether Cash had four months, four years or 10 left to live, that doesn't alter what we see in the video: a man who clearly is physically changed, weary and weathered and beaten down by age and grief. That his wife is in the video and died around the time of its release makes it so much more...timely? Real? I don't know. And then Johnny Cash died, too. "Hurt" became his final statement as an artist. That it dealt with his life, his love and his death makes it hard to watch, but you also can't turn away from it. Right off the top of my head, I can't think of a better music video. I'm always partial to Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel, and I'm sure there are a host of others. But none of them made me cry and want to hold my wife's hand, which I would have done if she had been sitting closer to me.
So, that's a full night, right? Yes, but we weren't done yet. As Cliff and I channel surfed, we ended up on a PBS showing of a Joel Katz documentary about Billie Holiday, and her song "Strange Fruit". I am shamefully ignorant of Billie Holiday's career. I know a bit about her story and I know she was a giant badass, but that's about all I could tell you. I wasn't even particularly sure of her era, thinking she was more from the 1920's and '30s, when really she was late 30s, 40s and 50s.
"Strange Fruit" is a song about lynching. It was perhaps the first protest song in this country. Most of the documentary was about the intersection of Holliday and the song's writer, a Jewish schooteacher from New York named Abel Meeropol. Meeropol originally wrote the song as a poem, inspired after seeing photographs of a lynching in 1937.
As the documentary plays out, we learn a great deal about Meeropol's and Holiday's relative backgrounds, as well as the history of lynchings in the early and middle part of the 20th century. And we hear the lyrics of the song, as well. But only at the end of the program do we actually see Billie Holiday sing the song...and it totally blew me away. It wasn't what I expected at all from Billie Holiday, who I associated with a sort of swing/ragtime sort of style about lost loves and whatnot. I expected a grainy film that didn't quite move at the speed of normal life, like watching those old clips of Babe Ruth running the bases like a cartoon. Instead, the image of Billie Holiday we see as she sings "Strange Fruit" is crisp, clear, decidedly modern, even for 1958.
The performance aired on BBC television in 1958. Holiday had made the song famous back in the late '30s, and it had been banned on virtually all radio stations because of it's "inciteful" nature. As the '40s and '50s rolled on, lynchings remained a painful fact of life, especially in the deep South. But in the era of McCarthyism, people who were vocal about civil rights tended to also be vocal about Communist causes. As a result, blacks and whites were discouraged from taking visible stands against discrimination, and certainly against lynching. "Strange Fruit" was still relevant, unfortunately, in 1958. Billie Holiday couldn't sing it here in the United States, but the UK was another matter.
The shot opens with Billie Holiday on a stage, dressed in an elegant gown. Behind her is only a curtain and her piano player, Sonny White. Filmed in black and white, it seems surprisingly modern, with interesting camera angles and close-ups and great film and audio quality. Holiday is only 44, but she could easily pass for 54. Still, she is a beautiful woman, hardened by a life that knew much pain. She would be dead less than a year after this was filmed.
It's a slow, haunting performance, and seeing her do it live just before her death, with so much feeling was every bit as powerful as the Cash video. I can't do justice to her rendition of Meeropol's poem, all I can suggest is that you find Joel Katz's documentary and see it for yourself. Still, Meeropol's words alone have a power that is hard to imagine. As Joel Katz says, "It still amazes me how twelve lines can change the world."
"Strange Fruit", Albert Meeropol, 1939
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
After a night when Outkast took over the world and the Grammy's threw a party that featured an eclectic and sometimes powerful collection of performances, I still can't get the images and voices of Johnny Cash and Billie Holiday out of my mind.
12:30:22 PM 
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