About Updates to My Posts—with an update to Billie Holiday "Strange Fruit," Part 3 (+Bonus)

Hello Friends,

I am always researching, and sometimes I make slight edits after I’ve already posted an article. Usually I am just tweaking the language slightly, not the content, so there’s no need to alert all of my readers. However, in the case of Holiday “Strange Fruit” Part 3, I belatedly found a newspaper clipping—attached below—that strongly adds to my case. I have also added this to the original post, so if you have read the post with the word “Updated” in the title, you’ve already seen what I’m posting below.

But I’ve also attached below a small bonus for paying subscribers, as I often do to thank you. This one is an audio clip that is not in the article (this is part of the Savory collection, unissued, and used by permission, with thanks to Loren Schoenberg and the Jazz Museum in Harlem).

I’m not sure if there is a better way to handle updates and revisions. I hesitate to send an article out to everybody all over again, because I don’t want to spam you, my dear readers. And if I were to send one out again, I’d want to indicate what has been changed, so you won’t have to read the whole thing to find the revisions.

If you have a suggestion, please let me know. THANK YOU.

OK, here goes:

PREVIOUSLY POSTED:

I’ve already debunked the false claim that Anslinger and the FBI were after Holiday specifically because she sang “Strange Fruit.” But here are more details for you: Holiday’s FBI file is a mere 10 pages, and it is entirely devoted to her arrest in San Francisco in February 1949 (she was later cleared). The only other government files on Holiday are the separate court records, and the file from the prison that she was sent to in 1947. Stuart Nicholson went through all of these closely when writing his well-researched Holiday biography, and he found no reference anywhere to “Strange Fruit.” This is consistent with what other researchers have found regarding other artists. In general, the narcotics-related files from the ’40s and ’50s are solely concerned with drugs, whereas the political files are almost entirely devoted to rooting out communists.

NEW MATERIAL:

In fact, the one time it was reported (in the Black newspaper The Amsterdam News, August 31, 1940, p.11) that the FBI interfered with her act, it was to ask her to stop singing “The Yanks Are Not Coming,” which argued against the U.S.A. getting involved in World War II. (As far as I know, there was no song of that title, but I think Billie took the famous line “The Yanks Are Coming” from the World War One song “Over There” by Charles M. Cohan, and added the word “Not.” If anyone knows more about this song, please let me know.) They ignored “Strange Fruit” altogether, even though she was singing it as part of the same engagement! Here is the relevant part of the article: