AP Television Writer

Billie Holiday's brilliant interpretation of "Strange Fruit" made the haunting song about Southern lynchings her own. But the composer, a Jewish schoolteacher from New York, remained nearly anonymous.

Now Abel Meeropol gets his due in a documentary that, while acknowledging the man and his achievement, is respectful of Holiday's contribution.

"Strange Fruit," airing 10 p.m. EST Tuesday (check local listings) as part of PBS' "Independent Lens" series, also seeks to fit the song into the important but sometimes uneasy cultural and political alliance of black and Jewish America.

Joel Katz's film touches as well on Meeropol's link to another part of 20th-century American history: He and wife Anne adopted the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg after the couple were executed in 1953 for espionage.

"My father was most proud of 'Strange Fruit,' of all the things he ever did. He was most proud of that," one of the Rosenberg boys, Michael Meeropol, says in the film.

It is the song and its horrific images of hatred, contained in just a dozen lines, that drive the hourlong documentary:

"Southern trees bear a 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

Pastoral scene of the gallant South

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh

And the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop"

The evocative images were set with a jeweler's precision into a melody that resonates with the somberness of a funeral dirge and the grace of a spiritual.

(The Tuskegee Institute and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have documented more than 3,000 lynchings between 1865 and 1965, and believe there were more. Such attacks are not relegated to history, the film reminds us, citing the racially motivated dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Texas in 1998.)

The strength of "Strange Fruit" was not just the song's fervor, Katz said from his office at New Jersey City University, where he teaches filmmaking.

"It is testimony as to how art can successfully carry a political message and still be successful as art," he said. "In these 12 lines, we have this great marriage of something with a powerful political message and something which has great holding power and integrity as a poem and a piece of music."

A filmed Holiday performance reminds us of the song's undiminished strength. There is also a charmingly impromptu performance by folk singer Pete Seeger and an affecting Cassandra Wilson rendition that ends Katz's documentary.

Although Holiday claimed the song was written for her and that she participated in its creation, that was not the case. But she gave it her inimitable style and bravely brought the politically charged song to public attention, at some risk to her then-fledgling career.

What was to become a civil rights anthem first saw light as a poem in a teachers union publication in the late 1930s, according to those who knew Meeropol. He wrote the song under the pen name Lewis Allan.

"This was the kind of thing that, when you heard, you couldn't applaud at first," colleague Honey Kassoy recalls in the film. "It was just so, so gripping."

A photo of a lynching victim is said to have inspired Meeropol, who is recalled as a buoyant and witty man, to create the song's dark imagery. He wrote other songs, most notably the lyrics for "The House I Live In," a call for racial tolerance made famous by Frank Sinatra.

Meeropol and Holiday were brought together after a publicist for Cafe Society, a New York club where Holiday appeared, heard "Strange Fruit" at a cabaret night staged by an activist theatrical group.

During a meeting in February 1939, Meeropol played the song for Holiday and she agreed to record it (her outstanding arrangement was by pianist Sonny White). Despite a widespread radio station ban which Katz said was prompted by the song's topic, it reached No. 16 on the charts as record stores and clubs helped create word-of-mouth demand.

The Meeropol-Holiday collaboration was extraordinary, according to observers heard in the film.

Other Jewish-American composers had been influenced by black musical tradition but had created mostly mainstream, apolitical songs that were generally performed by whites.

"There's this sense of the Jewish American being the middleman between the public, which has limited tolerance for blacks as a people but kind of likes some of the cultural products of it, and the people and the culture and music of black America," musician Don Byron says.

Meeropol's song was "something quite militant," Byron says. And through her performance, Holiday claimed it for black America.

"It got to be Billie Holiday's piece," poet Amina Baraka (wife of New Jersey poet laureate, Amiri Baraka) says. "You know, initially, I tell you the truth, I thought a black person had written it."

The collaboration, said Katz, "certainly provides a powerful counterstory to illustrate these relationships were not always cast in one particular mold."

And the atypical partnership of a white Jewish songwriter and a black jazz singer created an unforgettable American song.


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