David Margolick, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Robert O’Meally in Conversation: Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" - 92Y, New York
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Billie Holiday: Reaching for the Moon—An Exploration and Celebration

Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”

David Margolick, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Robert O’Meally in Conversation
David Margolick, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Robert O’Meally

Time magazine named “Strange Fruit” “the Song of the Century” in 1999.

David Margolick, author of Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University and author of In Search of Billie Holiday, and Robert O’Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and founder and director of the Center for Jazz Studies, join us for a deep dive into the song, its origins, and its enduring resonance. How did a poem written and set to music by a largely-unknown, Communist English teacher from the Bronx become Billie Holiday’s signature song? How did it contribute to both defining and destroying her? How does it fit into the history of American, and international, protest music? And why, more than 80 years after Holiday first recorded it, does it continue to pack such a punch? Hear three brilliant minds explore these questions and more, about a song like no other.

Purchase a copy of David Margolick’s Strange Fruit.

Purchase a copy of Farah Jasmine Griffin’s If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday.

Purchase a copy of Robert O’Meally’s Lady Day: The Many Faces Of Billie Holiday.

This event is part of Billie Holiday: Reaching for the Moon—An Exploration and Celebration

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David Margolick

David Margolick, a former long-time reporter for The New York Times and Vanity Fair, is the author of several books …

David Margolick

David Margolick, a former long-time reporter for The New York Times and Vanity Fair, is the author of several books, including Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song; Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock; Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink; and Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns. He is currently completing a book about Sid Caesar. He lives in New York City.

Farah Jasmine Griffin

Farah Jasmine Griffin is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature …

Farah Jasmine Griffin

Farah Jasmine Griffin is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the inaugural chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University. Professor Griffin received her B.A. from Harvard, where she majored in American History and Literature and her PhD in American Studies from Yale. Professor Griffin has published widely on issues of race and gender, feminism, jazz and cultural politics. Her most recent book is Harlem Nocturne:  Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II, and her essays and articles have appeared in Essence, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, Art Forum and elsewhere.

Robert G. O’Meally

Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University …

Robert G. O’Meally

Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for twenty-five years. The founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, O'Meally is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers, and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. His edited volumes include The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Essays on Jazz, History and Memory in African American Culture, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (co-editor), and the Barnes and Noble editions of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. For his production of a Smithsonian record set called The Jazz Singers, he was nominated for a Grammy Award. O’Meally has cocurated exhibitions for The Smithsonian Institution, Jazz at Lincoln Center and The High Museum of Art (Atlanta). He has held Guggenheim and Cullman Fellowships, and was a recent fellow at Columbia's new Institute for Ideas and Imagination at the Global Center/Paris. His new books are The Romare Bearden Reader (edited for Duke University Press, 2019) and Antagonistic Cooperation: Collage, Jazz, and American Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020).

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