Summary
In a special collaboration with NPR Music's Turning the Tables Series, how "Strange Fruit" turned Billie Holiday into one of the first victims of the War on Drugs.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 1939, the great jazz singer, Billy Holiday, walked onto a stage. |
| 0:06.8 | She stands on this stage and she sang for the first time a song |
| 0:13.5 | called Strange Fruit. |
| 0:15.9 | Salon trees, |
| 0:20.7 | bears strange |
| 0:24.4 | fruit. |
| 0:26.7 | And years later, Billy Holiday received a warning |
| 0:32.1 | from agents at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics |
| 0:35.9 | and the warning said effectively, stop singing this song. |
| 0:41.1 | Strange fruit from the public dreams. |
| 0:50.1 | Hey, I'm Randabde Fattah. |
| 0:57.5 | I'm Ramteen Arablui. |
| 0:59.2 | And on this episode of Through Line from NPR, a special collaboration with NPR |
| 1:03.8 | music's Turning the Table series, how Billy Holiday sang the song Strange Fruit |
| 1:09.2 | and became one of the first victims of the war on drugs. |
| 1:18.6 | So why was Billy Holiday on that stage? |
| 1:22.0 | And why was the government so interested in her? |
| 1:25.1 | To answer those questions, we need to go back to the beginning of her story. |
| 1:30.6 | Billy Holiday was born in Philadelphia, but she grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 1:36.7 | She came from a kind of working class, working poor background. |
| 1:40.4 | This is Farah Jasmine Griffin. |
| 1:42.2 | I am the chair of the African American and African diaspora studies department at Columbia |
... |
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