I am lucky that my wife and I have a sizeable overlapping set of interests in movies.

I noticed she had saved a documentary about Billie Holiday. I thought I’d heard enough about her history and wanted to prioritize my time elsewhere. Yet, I knew enough to trust my wife’s recommendation to “Say Yes More Often.”

Yes, let’s watch it.

I was in my late teens, I think, when I first heard the song, Strange Fruit. At the time it was disturbing, and it didn’t take me long to know it was about lynching in the United States. The ‘fruit’ was a metaphor for the bodies of black people hanging from the trees.

The Strange Fruit pulled together a couple of important moments in American history.

Let’s go down the first rabbit hole.

Abel Meeropol wrote Strange Fruit after seeing a picture of a lynching. The public high school in the Bronx he attended had James Baldwin, Richard Rogers, Burt Lancaster, Stan Lee, Neil Simon, and Ralph Lauren to name a few graduates.

Not bad company.

He was driven to write a poem about the picture’s subject and set the words to music. He played the song for a nightclub owner, who passed it on to Billie Holiday.

Time magazine named Stange Fruit the song of the century in 1999—not for the previous year but the last 100 years.

The government at the time had its war on drugs and repeatedly arrested Billie Holiday with a combination of real and planted evidence, trying to reduce the impact she was having on the civil rights movement.

Now comes the other rabbit hole. Hang on.

Abel Meeropol used a pseudonym when writing poetry and music: Lewis Allan.

Here is a direct quote from the transcript of NPR’s broadcast on this story. I had to read the paragraph several times.

“Abel Meeropol’s pen name ‘Lewis Allen’ were the names of their children who were stillborn, who never lived, says his son, Robert Meeropol, Paul. He and his older brother, Michael, were raised by Abel, and his wife, Anne Meeropol, after the boys’ parents – Ethel and Julius Rosenberg – were executed for espionage in 1953.”

The orphaned boys, Robert and Michael, were 6 and 10 respectively when adopted by the Meeropols.

I’m so glad I listened to my wife’s recommendation.

Please give this a bit of a think. Are there tentacles of coincidence or planning in your life? One place to start is to pick an important person in your life. What were the unplanned dots that connected you to this person?

I am curious about your thoughts. Please comment below with your bit of a think.

Photo by Ali Alauda on Unsplash

 My thanks to National Public Radio in the USA.

If you enjoyed The Blog, please share it with others. Thanks.

And my thanks to St. Albert’s 50+ Activity Centre for making this Blog possible.

Volunteer Blogger

glenn.walmsley@icloud.com