But Holiday’s rendition is the version that, like Holiday herself, and like all of our still-thriving misconceptions about her, has endured - for good reason. Holiday was not even the first person to sing “Strange Fruit.” In fact, the song began as a protest poem by Jewish-American songwriter Abel Meeropol, who set it to music. A voice that strips any listener of the excuse to leave those histories unacknowledged - all the more so in the moment of Holiday’s performances, in which the wounds and terrors were still fresh, the bodies still hanging. Few works better testify to this than Holiday’s renditions of “Strange Fruit,” which frightened the establishment and moved Black listeners to tears and fury, not only because of the song’s lyrics, but because of the voice transmitting them, a voice that laid the soul of that song, the histories that the words could only name, open. Billie Holiday on Hulu hereīillie Holiday stands out from these other films for focusing on the activism of a Black artist - for, in theory, focusing on the art, itself, as the activism. It is hard to imagine an account of Black activism that isn’t, in part, a story of the forces working to suppress that fight - forces as pervasive and seemingly insurmountable as the nation itself. For all three of these films to be given such confrontationally binary titles - titles that evoke political warfare - is telling. Billie Holiday tracks two stories at once, much like Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI and Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah, which, like Daniels’ film, are attempts to unbury essential conflicts in the history of Black political activism and, to the extent that movies can be trusted as historical record of any kind, put them on the record. So, no, this is no straightforward biopic. It tells the story of Holiday’s life and career in the wake of the song “Strange Fruit” - her elegy to Black lives lost to decades of lynching in the long aftermath of the Reconstruction - making the airwaves, filling concert halls, and pissing off certain people. Lee Daniels’ new movie, which stars a charismatically downplayed Andra Day as the titular, completely singular, and in many ways unknowable Lady Day, is set primarily in the 1940s. Billie Holiday, so you know there must be a battle at stake.
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It’s a movie called The United States Vs.
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