Billie+Holiday

** H a RLEM R ena i  SS an C e    ** //<span style="display: block; font-size: 150%; color: rgb(248,196,13); text-align: center;">♪ ♫ ** BiLLiE HOLiDAY ** ♫ ♪ //  (click on the picture to listen as Billie Holiday sings The Blues are Brewin')

<span style="font-size: 80%; color: rgb(0,0,0);">picture from __[]__ <span style="display: block; font-size: 80%; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: center;">// "I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music." - Billie Holiday // <span style="display: block; color: rgb(186,69,186); text-align: left;"> <span style="font-size: 110%; color: rgb(0,128,128); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Bibliography <span style="display: block; font-size: 13px; color: rgb(0,15,3); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: left;">Billie Holiday was born on April 7, 1915 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her mother was 13 years old, when Billie Holiday was born. Her real name was Eleanora Gough McKay. Holiday didn’t have a very good relationship with her father, who was a jazz guitarist in Fletcher Henderson’s band. Living in extreme poverty, Holiday dropped out of school in the fifth grade and found a job running errands in a brothel. When she was twelve, Billie moved to Harlem with her mother, where she was eventually arrested for prostitution. Desperate for money, Holiday looked for work as a dancer at a Harlem speakeasy. When there were not any openings for dancers, she auditioned as a singer. Long interested in both jazz ad the blues, Holiday impressed the owner and found herself singing at the popular Pod and Jerry's Log Cabin. This led to a number of other jobs in Harlem jazz clubs,and by 1933 she had her first major breakthrough. She was only twenty when the well-connected jazz writer and producer John Hammond heard her fill in for a better known performer. Soon after he repoted that she was the greatest singer he had ever heard. With Hammond's support, Holiday spent much of the 1930s working with a range of great jazz musicians, including Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, and most importantly, the saxophonist Lester Young. Together,Young and Holiday would create some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time. They were close friends throughout their lives, giving each other their now famous nicknames of "Lady Day" and the "Prez." Sympathetic to Holiday's unique jazz style singing, he helped her to create music thought would best highlight her talents. With songs like "This Year's Kisses"and"Mean to Me," the two composed a perfect collaboration. However, it was not until 1939, when her song "Strange Fruit", that Holiday found her real audience. It was a deeply powerful song about lynching, "Strange Fruit" was a revelation in its disturbing and emotional condemnation of racism. Due to constant racial attacks, Holiday had a difficult time touring and spent much of the 1940s working in New York. While her popularity was growing, Holiday's personal life remained troubled. Though one of the highest paid performers of the time, much of her income went to pay for her serious drug addictions. Though plagued by health problems, bad relationships, and addiction, Holiday remained an unequaled performer. By the 1940s, after the death of her mother, Holiday's heroin addiction became so bad she was repeatedly arrested, eventually checking herself into an institution in the hopes of breaking her habit. As Billie tried to recover from her addiction, she had a comeback period during the mid-1950s. She performed at Carnegie Hall a lengendary, New York concert hall and touredin Europe.She always made beautiful music and made many great recordings in spite of her physical and emotional problems. Sadly, Billie was never able to overcome her drug addiction. Her health began to fail and she died when she was forty five years old. <span style="font-size: 80%; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">picture from [] <span style="font-size: 80%; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">picture from [] <span style="display: block; font-size: 18px; color: rgb(219,6,73); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; background-color: rgb(250,250,250); text-align: left;">Billie Holiday in relation to the Harlem Renaissance During the Harlem Renaissance, African Americans were trying to re-define themselves in society. Many of them resorted to music to express their thoughts and individuality. All of Billie Holiday's songs were written about anti-racism. During the Harlem Renaissance, the idea of the New Negro, which was associated with people who used the production of literature, art, and music to challenge racism and stereotypes to promote socialist politics, and racial and social integration. Billie Holiday was one of the people who supported the New Negro and wanted social equality. In her song “Strange Fruit, she talks about life in the south and the lynching of African American Slaves. The song “Strange Fruit”, was based on a poem by Lewis Allan, a Jewish schoolteacher in the United States. When Holiday first sang the song she was fearful of retaliation, but after visualizing her father when she sang the song she insisted to keep singing it. Writing songs was Billie Holiday’s way of expressing her thoughts and beliefs about slavery and showed her overall support of the Harlem Renaissance movement. When Holiday joined Count Basie and eventually Artie Shaw in 1938, she became one of the very first black women to work with a white orchestra. Billie Holiday also helped in launching the Apollo Theater, which is one of the physical legacies of the Harlem Renaissance. It was a place where African Americans could show their talents and start their careers. // Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
 * <span style="display: block; color: rgb(128,0,128); text-align: center;">Strange Fruit **<span style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">

Pastoral scene of the gallant south, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, //// Here is a strange and bitter crop ////. // <span style="font-size: 13px; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Although the song ‘Strange Fruit’ is often associated with the famous singer Billie Holiday, it actually began as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, expressing his horrors after seeing a picture of a gruesome lynching scene. Addressing the issue of the lynching of African Americans, the poet accounts an intense, chilling description of a particular execution. However, his use of conspicuous metaphors, vivid imagery, and contradictions makes his poem stand out among the other literary works against the mass killings of innocent African Americans. The title, Strange Fruit, itself presents a different, startling point of view of the brutal lynching scenes. The title and the lines “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,/….Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,” used by the poet make a perturbing comparison of fruits, often associated with pleasantness and delight, with battered bloody bodies. His use of lines such as “Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,/ …The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,/…Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.” evokes a powerful, haunting imagery of the excruciating final moments of the dying people and their bodies swinging from trees drenched in blood, denoting the brutal nature of their deaths and the barbarousness of their apathetic assassins <span style="font-size: 13px; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">. Besides, by juxtaposing the idealistic Southern landscapes with the disturbing lynching setting in the lines “Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, / Then the sudden smell of burning flesh,” he adeptly portrays the harsh reality of the South, destroying the utopian image of the South. Apart from these poetic devices, the poet also makes use of repetition and caesura in the lines “For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, / For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,” and a rhyme scheme of aabb ccdd eeff in the three quatrains to immerse the reader and leave a strong, long lasting impact. The heart wrenching killings of blacks especially in the South were often justified and even encouraged by various high authorities and officials. By presenting this disturbing, provocative poem, Meeropol as well as Holiday try to capture the attention of the people and urge them not to ignore the conditions of the helpless tortured African Americans. Thus, this poem chillingly yet accurately depicts the terrible lynching scenes, and leaves behind the dark, fearful images of the American holocaust.

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