Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz singer and songwriter.
Nicknamed “Lady Day” by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo.
Critic John Bush wrote that Holiday “changed the art of American pop vocals forever.” She co-wrote only a few songs, but several of them have become jazz standards, notably “God Bless the Child”, “Don’t Explain”, “Fine and Mellow”, and “Lady Sings the Blues”. She also became famous for singing “Easy Living”, “Good Morning Heartache”, and “Strange Fruit”, a protest song which became one of her standards and was made famous with her 1939 recording. Music critic Robert Christgau called her “uncoverable, possibly the greatest singer of the century”.
LAUGHING AT LIFE
Billie Holiday
Don’t mind the rain drops
Wait till the rain stops
Smile through your tears, laughing at life
No road is lonely, if you will only
Lose all your blues laughing at life
Live for tomorrow, be happy today
Laugh all your sorrows away
Start now and cheer up
The skies will clear up
Lose all your blues laughing at life
Don’t mind the rain drops
Wait till the rain stops
You’ll find the sun laughing at life
No road is lonely, if you will only
Smile through your tears, laugh at life
Live for tomorrow, be happy today
Laugh all your sorrows away
Start now and cheer up
The skies will clear up
Lose all your blues laughing at life
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“Strange Fruit” is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday, who first sang and recorded it in 1939.
Written by the teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem, a white, Jewish high school teacher from the Bronx, as a protest against lynchings. It exposed American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans. Such lynchings had occurred chiefly in the South but also in other regions of the United States. Meeropol set it to music and with his wife and the singer Laura Duncan, performed it as a protest song in New York venues, including Madison Square Garden.
The song has been covered by artists, as well as inspiring novels, other poems and other creative works. In 1978, Holiday’s version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.
STRANGE FRUIT
Lyrics by Abel Meerpol
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin’ eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin’ 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 the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop