Billie Holiday, seen in 1947, sang of a lynching 76 years ago.Library of Congress
Every now and then a call goes out for a moratorium on the performance of a particular play or piece of music, or on writing about a particular artist. A lot of these calls, I notice, seem to involve William Shakespeare.
Another artist, however, crossed my mind a few weeks ago as a moratorium candidate – namely Billie Holiday. The prompt came from the realization that were she alive today, the former Eleanora Fagan would be marking her 100th birthday on April 7. Of course, there's no way the Holiday we know would have lived to 100. Certain musicians you can actually imagine reaching their centennial, such as Sir Mick Jagger who, as the son of a high school gym teacher, was a committed bodybuilder in his teens. But Holiday? Uh-uh.
What writer Elizabeth Hardwick called "the sheer enormity of [the singer's] vices," the "opulent devastation" wrought by prostitution, rape, poverty, heroin, whisky, racism, unstable marriages, police harassment and abuse made it inevitable Lady Day would go roughly into that good night sooner rather than later.
A lot was written about Holiday during her lifetime, and a lot more since she made her final exit in 1959, at 44. Maybe, in fact, too much. What Francis Davis wrote in 2000 about Holiday seems just as just-so today: that she was, as "incontestable fact," the "greatest woman jazz singer ever" and, with Frank Sinatra, the only recording artist "from the first half of the 20th century [who] seems more real to us, more like our contemporary." A lot of writing, a lot of conversation, debates, symposiums and close listening have created that incontestable fact. And with them has come, for some at least, the sensation of completion, or at least diminished returns – that even if more can be said, why should it, since it likely already has been and is unlikely to matter much if it hasn't.
Holiday fan though I am, I counted myself among those who, if not in favour of a sort of moratorium, were at least willing, on the eve of her anniversary, to pause before the prospect of reading one more foray into her life and lore. Or rehashing the merits of 1955 Billie versus those of 1943 Billie.
Or attending a Holiday tribute event. Or making one of those "10 Billie Holiday Classics You Must Hear Before You Die" lists.
Then a couple of things happened. One was the report last month about a 54-year-old African-American, Otis Byrd, found hanging from a tree in the Mississippi woods, a bedsheet twisted around his neck. The other was a preview hearing of Coming Forth by Day, the much-anticipated new recording by Mississippi-born singer Cassandra Wilson. The Wilson album – its official release is this week – consists of 11 songs indelibly stamped by Holiday, plus one Wilson original.
Among the covers is Strange Fruit. First recorded by Holiday 76 years ago this spring, it became the singer's unlikely signature tune, a three-stanza depiction not of such Holiday thematic chestnuts as unrequited love and charismatic mistreaters but of a lynching in the American South. The music was slow, stately, the lyrics graphic and poetic – "Southern trees bear 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" – and Holiday sang them almost matter-of-factly, with "a certain holding back, a kind of dignity in distress," to quote Susan Sontag.
In the last 20 years of the 19th century and the first 35 of the 20th, lynching was a fact of life for southern African-Americans. The year Holiday was born, 56 unlawful hangings were recorded – a terrible number, yet only one-third of "the strange and bitter crop" harvested in 1892. Unsurprisingly, Holiday's anatomy of murderous vigilantism proved a sensation – "the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism," said one critic – and it stayed in her repertoire thereafter.
Wilson first covered Strange Fruit in 1995, making it a stripped-down, discreetly swinging affair, just her smoky contralto circled by cornet obbligati, gut-bucket bass, the rasp of a resophonic guitar. The new version is much more CinemaScopic, fierce and big, with tolling drums, ascending and descending string lines, piano and lots of electric guitar. I didn't like it much at first. Now I think it's kinda great – a sort of sonic exhumation for the 21st century that shrugs off the song's accumulated nostalgia and piety, lets in the rage, disappointment and frustration of Ferguson, Staten Island and Cleveland and blows all that into one howl.
Meanwhile, medical examiners in Mississippi continue to try to determine if the death of Otis Byrd was suicide or murder. Will there be much consolation either way? Suicide, we know, can be as much the result of desperation and straitened circumstance as pure volition. Whether Byrd's end was by his own hand or no, it's disturbing to think that mere weeks ago there was "fruit for the crows to pluck" in a Mississippi forest – and eerie to know Cassandra Wilson has made a 76-year-old song timely to that.