Billie Holiday: There was Never a Federal Campaign against "Strange Fruit"--Part 2 of 4

The origin of the falsehood.

(NOTE: This series is an expanded version of my article that was originally published in Jazz Times magazine, and I thank the editor Mac Randall for his fine work. Here is the original article, winner of the 2022 Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism in the pop music field.)

I showed in Part One that there was no federal campaign against “Strange Fruit.” So where did the fictional idea of this government conspiracy come from? The movie credits say that it is “based on” British journalist Johann Hari’s 2015 book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. But the book contains only a few pages about Holiday, and only a few sentences of those pages are depicted in the film, as I’ll show. Furthermore, Hari has never written about jazz before or since, and the book is not about Holiday, so he’s out of his depth. His footnotes show that he relies heavily on the 1987 biography by John White, which has long ago been superseded. He rightly cites the books by Julia Blackburn (With Billie, 2005) and Donald Clarke (Wishing on the Moon, second edition, 2000), but he is totally unaware of the authoritative and well-researched book by Stuart Nicholson, Billie Holiday (1995).

This passage in Hari’s book is the basis of the entire film: “It was on one of these nights … that she started to sing a song that would become iconic … Lady Day was ordered by the authorities to stop singing this song. She refused. Her harassment by Harry [Anslinger]’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics began the next day.”

Note the lack of clarity about dates. Since we don’t know what date we’re talking about, how can we say that her harassment began “the next day”? Hari’s footnotes lead to no government archives, but only to another author with no background in jazz. Julia Blackburn, with whom I corresponded, is a very accomplished British author whom I admire. But she freely admits that she is a Billie fan, not a jazz historian. The point of her book, as she told me by email, was “to present a more rounded portrait of Billie,” not to fact-check specific historical events. 

The section upon which Hari’s passage, and from there the movie, is based, is on her pg. 111: “She always claimed that ‘Strange Fruit’ was one of the reasons why she was hounded so fiercely by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the FBI. She said it was no coincidence that she defied an order not to sing it at the Earle Theater in Philadelphia and the next day was arrested on charges that eventually led to her imprisonment.”

But all of this is wrong. Holiday didn’t “always” claim this—to my knowledge, she never did. Nor did she get an “order” not to sing the song. All this derives from a complete misunderstanding of Blackburn’s one and only footnoted source­: an interview with Billie in the DownBeat of June 4, 1947, about her troubles with the law, the press, and audiences. Holiday is quoted as saying, “I’ve made lots of enemies too. Singing that ‘Strange Fruit’ hasn’t helped any, you know. I was doing it at the Earle [Theater in Philadelphia] ’til they made me stop. [italics mine] Tonight they’re already talking about me.”

She never said, and never meant, that the government asked her to stop. The context shows that the last sentence refers to audiences talking, not authorities. Notice too that she said she was singing it “’til they made me stop.” It’s ridiculous to assume that the government—the federal government, at that--suddenly forbade her to sing “Strange Fruit” after several nights at the Earle in Philadelphia, and after hundreds of other performances since 1939, including at much more prominent venues such as Town Hall in Manhattan and the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

It was the Earle Theater’s management (and/or audience members) who made her stop. But why would the Earle’s manager, or audience, ask her not to sing “Strange Fruit”? Because from Friday, May 9 through Thursday, May 15, 1947 (most sources give wrong dates), Billie was part of a “family” show at the Earle. Here is an ad from The Philadelphia Inquirer, a black newspaper:

She was alternating sets with Louis Armstrong, various comedians, and Big Town, a B movie. (Like most big Eastern theaters, the Earle had integrated audiences but usually featured all-Black or all-white stage acts. I thank singer Suzanne Cloud of Philadelphia for confirming this.) There were five showings of the movie each day starting at 11:15 a.m. Billie and Louis came on every three hours starting at 12:30 p.m., with their last show beginning at 9:30 p.m. Here are the showtimes:

The Philadelphia Inquirer issue of May 10, 1947 reviewed the program:

The popular Billie croons a varied list that includes “You’re Driving Me Crazy,” “Solitude,” “Billie’s Blues,” “No Greater Love” and “Lover Man,” most of these being Billie hits.

There is more singing by Armstrong … in “I Believe” and “New Orleans” as well as his trumpet; Leslie Scott, a sepia Sinatra …; and hefty Velma Middleton … Slim and Sweets did a comedy turn. Myers and Walker proved agile singing and dancing comedians; there’s an [sic] xylophone in the act, too.

Can you imagine Billie performing “Strange Fruit” in such a setting, at a family show at 12:30 in the afternoon, in between dancers, comedians, and a xylophonist? Even her devoted fans—and even you readers, and me--might have agreed that this was not the time and place for that song.

When Blackburn wrote that the government ordered Holiday to stop singing “Strange Fruit,” that was based on her interpretation of “they made me stop.” It was not the result of research—no documents support it—and as I’ve shown, it happens to be wrong. Hari took it at face value, researched no further, and ran with it, and from there it got picked up by the makers of The United States vs. Billie Holiday, on which Hari is credited as an executive producer.

Blackburn further presents this passage that Holiday’s friend Dufty wrote in a 1956 letter to a lawyer about Lady Sings the Blues: “Billie has been kicked around and harassed for years by the authorities. One of the reasons is that this song ‘Strange Fruit’ made her well-known and politically controversial.” That’s his theory—but where’s the proof? There is none. Dufty’s individual supposition, expressed privately, is in no way evidence that a government campaign actually happened. And—this is a key point—even he never said that the government tried to stop her from singing the song.

Now let’s explore Hari’s other sources … sorry, there are none! I emailed Hari and received only an automated reply, but Kevin Whitehead of NPR’s Fresh Air—the only journalist I know of who actually did some fact-checking on Daniels’ film—exchanged messages with Hari, who could produce no evidence other than what is noted in his book. In short, his lone source is Julia Blackburn, who, in her first entry into writing about jazz, misinterpreted a crucial statement by Holiday and threw in an immaterial letter by Dufty for good measure. Hari has nothing.

And who is Johann Hari? Hari has a badly blemished record. He was found to have plagiarized, and then he resigned from Britain’s The Independent in a major scandal in 2011. It also came out that he had maliciously edited the Wikipedia pages of people who had criticized him, using a false identity. He later published “Johann Hari: A Personal Apology.”

Probably because of that scandal, he peppered Chasing the Scream with footnotes and even put audio clips from his interviews online. However, when one follows the footnotes (as we’ve just done) and checks the interviews against what’s in the book, they don’t always support his text. In this case, as I’ve shown, they absolutely do not provide any evidence—not in the slightest—to support his claim that the federal government ever stopped Billie from singing “Strange Fruit,” nor even that they knew or cared that the song existed. British author Jeremy Duns has found other instances where Hari continued to misrepresent his sources, even after his public apology.

I ask you: Is Johann Hari the person you want to rely on for information about jazz? Seriously??

But it appears that the scandals surrounding Hari were unknown in the U.S.A. When his book came out he was on just about every relevant radio show and podcast. Apparently, all you have to do to get on one of these programs is to write an email offering to talk about something. If they like the idea, you’re on! There does not appear to be any vetting process whatsoever.

And clearly, the makers of The United States vs. Billie Holiday never doubted him. Instead, they asked themselves what it looked like when “the government” asked Holiday to stop (which, remember, never happened) at the Earle. They imagined that there must have been a line of local police officers waiting to arrest her, who then stormed the stage. This is completely nuts, and contrary to all reality.

But what in fact was the reputation of “Strange Fruit”? I’ll discuss that next time, very soon.

THANK YOU for reading, and for supporting my work!

Special thanks to Julia Blackburn, Kevin Whitehead, Stuart Nicholson, Donald Clarke, David Margolick, Daniel Peterson, Aidan Levy, Loren Schoenberg, Rob Hudson (Manager, Carnegie Hall archives), and Tab Lewis (Archivist of the National Archives and Records Administration).

(In case you missed it last time: I want to be very clear—I mean what I say, and Only what I say. Am I saying that the government’s campaign against narcotics wasn’t all that bad? No. In my opinion, drugs should never have been criminalized. Am I saying that Black people like Holiday weren’t unfairly targeted by the police in this country? Of course not. It’s crystal clear that they got worse treatment, and still do. I am Only saying that “Strange Fruit” had nothing to do with that. Nobody who writes or teaches should be using this movie as a source of information.)