“Billie Holiday reminds us to look unflinchingly at the face of power, to call things by their true names.”
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Tracy Fessenden. Fessenden is the Steve and Margaret Forster Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Her book is Religion Around Billie Holiday.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Tracy Fessenden: Billie Holiday knew and told us, unforgettably, that ignorance and hatred allied with power are not new realities, that their roots run very deep. When I began writing Religion Around Billie Holiday, Barack Obama was president, and the 2016 election was several years away. I could not have imagined that Obama would be succeeded in office by the most ruthless of the Birthers, that the Nazis who marched and murdered in Charlottesville would be praised from the White House as “good people,” that brown children in the thousands would be ripped from their parents’ arms to be warehoused in cages or disappeared. Living with Billie Holiday in the writing of this book reminded me that what was painfully new and strange to me was to others painfully familiar. Every fresh horror that pierced me even in the reading of it had been borne in the flesh by Black people. Chicago journalist Vernon Jarrett, the father of Valerie Jarrett, watched Billie Holiday perform “Strange Fruit” in 1947. “She was standing up there singing this song as though this was for real,” Jarrett said, “as if she had just witnessed a lynching. . . There was a sense of resignation, as if ‘these people are going to have power for a long time and I can’t do a damn thing about it except put it in a song.’” As we take stock of the present moment and seek for ways to channel outrage into action, Billie Holiday reminds us to look unflinchingly at the face of power, to call things by their true names.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
Action on behalf of justice takes many forms. Witnessing is an action. “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s one exactingly political song of the hundreds she recorded, wasn’t in any way forward-looking or hopeful or programmatic, even as it inspired actions that are all of these things. I spend some time in the book on the tensions that surfaced between Holiday and the song’s author, Abel Meeropol, over the part she played in creating the song. Meeropol had written and scored the song before Holiday performed it, and she, of course, put her own indelible signature on it. Like so many composers whose songs Holiday recorded, Meeropol was the son of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms of czarist Russia. He was a teacher and a labor activist as well as a writer and composer, and he wrote rousing anthems of social betterment that railed against prejudice and injustice in all its forms. When Americans Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted on espionage charges and executed by the U.S. government in 1953, an act Jean-Paul Sartre and others decried as a “legal lynching,” Meeropol and his wife adopted their very young sons. In a 1995 letter to the New York Times, these sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, insisted that“you don’t have to be black to hate lynching or to compose bluesy music.” The occasion of their letter was a review that had left intact what they described as a “falsehood” in Billie Holiday’s autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, which was that she and her accompanists had had a hand in creating the melody to “Strange Fruit.” The song hadn’t made Meeropol much money—he collected two dollars in royalties for itin 1941—but after Lady Sings the Blues appeared he made a campaign of being recognized as the song’s sole author, words and music, and his sons continue the effort.
“Holiday’s ‘Strage Fruit’ is ‘an excruciatingly faithful testament to the legacy of lynching in the present.’”
My guess is that the conflict between Billie Holiday and Abel Meeropol was less about property in the melody of “Strange Fruit” and more about the standpoint from which the song was voiced. For Meeropol, African-Americans and Jews marched shoulder to shoulder in the cause of freedom from racial terror and injustice. Lynching was one of Meeropol’s themes, a dark middle passage in the history of progress for which his words and music made a soundtrack. It’s what the march of freedom leaves behind. Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” articulates a different vision. Hers is not a shuddering backward glance at lynching. It is instead an excruciatingly faithful testament to the legacy of lynching in the present. She offers a witness, not a remedy. But witnessing can carry extraordinary power.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
There's an implicit pushback in the book against the notion that religion is always either liberating or oppressive. Or always anything. Religion Around Billie Holiday is in this sense a contribution to the study of lived religion, the ways people move with or through or against the religious environments they find themselves in, and what they create or alter in those spaces in doing so, whether they identify religiously or not. Holiday was baptized Catholic and spent time in a convent reform school, and she moved in and out of various Catholic contexts over the course of her life. Catholicism wasn’t her identity so much as it was her material. To neglect this part of her story, to me, would be like overlooking Pentecostalism in the life of James Baldwin or Jewishness in the career of Philip Roth. Her Catholic upbringing separated Holiday in this respect from so many of the great women vocalists of the twentieth century who came up in Afro-Protestant churches.
The difference of her Catholicism contributed, I think, to Billie Holiday’s remarkable understanding of religion more generally as material, as a form she could shape or bend in the same way she bent her notes. She could flip the script in some slyly subversive ways. Her song “God Bless the Child” is a great example. The original sheet music for the song, for which Holiday shares songwriting credit with composer Arthur Herzog, says that “God Bless the Child,” a “swing-spiritual,” is “based on the authentic proverb ‘god blessed the child that’s got his own.’” But “God Bless the Child” isn’t really a spiritual, it doesn’t really swing, and it’s nowhere among the Proverbs in the Bible. According to Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues, the words “God Bless the Child” came to her during a spat with her mother, Sadie. Sadie was running an after-hours club in Harlem, and she’d said no when Billie wanted money from the till, even though Billie had financed the operation herself by way of the stream of favors, gifts, and cash she received from an amorous fan, a New York socialite she calls “Brenda.”
“Catholicism wasn’t her identity so much as it was her material.”
“Brenda” was the heiress Louise Crane, and she came from a family that literally printed money, since the Crane stationery company had supplied the U.S. Treasury with its rag paper since the Hayes administration. Crane was well known to Holiday’s producer at Columbia Records, John Hammond, whose family moved in the same circles—Hammond was a Vanderbilt on his mother’s side. Hammond had refused to record “Strange Fruit” on Columbia, and his concern for appearances extended to the worry that Louise Crane’s family would be tarnished by her association with Billie Holiday. Hammond came between the pair by bringing news of their affair to Crane’s family of bluebloods, and by putting an end to Holiday’s long-running New York gig at Café Society, the Greenwich Village nightclub where she’d begun to close each set with “Strange Fruit.”
Shortly before breaking up Holiday and Louise Crane, Hammond had dismissed Holiday from the lineup of his famous Carnegie Hall concert, “From Spirituals to Swing.” The “Spirituals to Swing” program featured an extraordinary roster of Black musical artists, including Lester Young, Count Basie, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Quite paternalistically, Hammond arranged the performers in a kind of living diorama of Black musical development as he understood it, a trajectory that progressed from what he considered primitive tribal sounds, to the spirituals of the church, culminating finally in swing. Hammond would say he fired Holiday from the concert because of her drug use; others say she walked away because he nickeled and dimed her, and because he wanted her to perform in a way that fit his own story of what Black music should be. So “God Bless the Child,” Holiday’s own swing-spiritual, was among other things a rebuff to John Hammond, a way of letting him know that she had her own wherewithal, that she would do as she liked, and that she knew more about spirituals andswing than he would ever fathom.
“God Bless the Child” is probably the most covered of Holiday’s songs. It’s become a kind of secular hymn, and a sacred hymn, too, with a place in the performance repertories of gospel choirs, Black and white, throughout the world.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
So many intellectual giants have been moved to write about Billie Holiday—Angela Davis, James Cone, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin come immediately to mind. The best biographies of Holiday are also the most intellectually wide-ranging—those by Farah Jasmine Griffin, Robert O’Meally, and John Szwed are three I’ve learned the most from. I take inspiration not only from the creative, brilliant people who have turned their attention to Billie Holiday, but also from the fact that Holiday had this effect on so many of them. I don’t know of another musical artist who so captured the imagination of other artists and intellectuals. Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove, Langston Hughes, and Frank O’Hara all made gorgeous poems about her. Jack Kerouac wrote her into On the Road. Orson Welles wanted to put her in his films. I’m hearing that the screenplay for a new, long-overdue movie of Holiday’s life is being written by the great Suzan-Lori Parks. When she was nineteen Duke Ellington gave her the lone singing role in his Symphony in Black. Composer Mary Lou Williams based a part of her Zodiac Suite on Billie Holiday. What these artists saw in Holiday was a fellow artist and an innovator, someone who, as Williams put it, “made sounds and things you’ve never heard before.”
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
I try to resist crediting Billie Holiday with offering a particular blueprint or program for a transformed world. To see her in these terms is to undersell her achievement. Billie Holiday took the measure of the world as it is, shadows and light, and made something from it, something new. Barack Obama said that Holiday was one of his great early influences because he heard in her music, “beneath the layers of hurt,” a “willingness to endure. Endure—and make music that wasn’t there before.” Holiday inspires us to imagine new worlds in the way she inspired her accompanists to make new sounds, or artists and writers to meet her art with their own. Billie Holiday gave us a world with Billie Holiday in it. Any new world we can imagine starts from there.
Roberto Sirvent is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network. He’s currently writing a book with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong called American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: The Fake News of U.S. Empire.
We are joined by Jasiri Fahali Kiyamaa, an organizer of Curbfest, an event advocating for political prisoners. New York City's Curbfest will take place on Saturday, September 7, 2024 in Brooklyn.
In 2020 our late comrade Glen Ford spoke at a Black is Back Coalition video conference on political prisoners. In these excerpts of his remarks, he discussed the need to understand the political…
We are joined by Cecilia Prado, the Chairperson of A Luta Sigue who is working with the drivers to organize the Tennessee Drivers Union strike and others on labor organizing in Nashville and Memphis…
In this week’s segment we hear about the exploitation of ride share workers and a labor action in Tennessee, a state hostile to worker organizing. But first we discuss organizing on behalf of…
The incessant and increasingly harsh attacks on the Green Party are indicators of its appeal to millions of people. Democrats engage in political fakery and smear campaigns against the greens because…
