Billie Holiday

Eleanora Fagan was born April 7th, 1915 in Philadelphia and grew up in Baltimore. She took her professional name from one of her idols, the actress Billie Dove. She never learned to read music or had any formal training but by the age of 18, she made her first commercial recording with Benny Goodman. Two years later she starred alongside Duke Ellington in “Symphony In Black.” In 1938 she becomes the vocalist for Artie Shaw, the first time a Black woman works with a white orchestra. Among her many hits, were the 1939 debut of “Strange Fruit” at New York City’s Café Society, which was the City’s first integrated nightclub. In 1944 she recorded “Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be)” which was written especially for her by Puerto Rican jazz guitarist Ram Ramírez. That song became her highest charted Pop hit peaking at #16 on the charts. Billie passed away July 17th, 1959 and is buried
in the Bronx at St. Raymond’s Cemetery. The Bronx played another role in her legacy as well. The song, “Strange Fruit” was written in the 1930s by Abel Meerpol an English teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School (he is also remembered for being a member of the Communist Party and adopting the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed in 1953 for selling atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union). He was compelled to write a poem after seeing a gruesome photo of a lynch-
ing. The poem was published as “Bitter Fruit” in a 1937 issue of The New York Teacher, a publication of the Teacher’s Union. He later set the poem to music and the song was performed in political circles. The song, which depicts lynching in all its brutality, has been called the “original protest song” and it articulated the growing anger that would find expression in the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1939, one night while at Café Society Billie Holiday was performing and he asked if she could sing it. She soon performed it at other venues and it became her signature song, even though it was virtually banned from the radio. In 1999 Time magazine called “Strange Fruit” the song of the century.