Being the youngest of four, I rarely had control of anything growing up, least of all the TV remote. Or the radio knob — so I grew up listening to many American Southern rock ballads. (That’s my brother’s fault. All his. Completely.) And a lot of Jim Croce and Christopher Cross (also brother). And a smattering of ABBA and Donna Summer (I blame my sisters for these). They all agreed on liking the Eagles very much.
A digital drawing of Jim Croce (Procreate on iPad Pro).
Hence, the evolution of my musical tastes was dictated most powerfully by access.
And as allowances increased, so widened the choice of personal music devices (Walkmans, my dears, ever heard?), and my tastes moved towards New Wave: Depeche Mode from middle school years and faithfully through high school (because they were full of great, angry sarcasm and many irreparable sadnesses), a bit of Pet Shop Boys (who, nearly two decades later, held a concert at Hammerstein Ballroom and proved, yes indeed, they were not auto-tuned at all and sounded wondrous), a spattering of New Order, and that one beloved song by Alphaville that people insist on covering and always ends up becoming Das Poopzikles aus Poopz.
I trod only very lightly on the grunge of the 90s and aughts (it drew too close to the screeching tinnitus of punk for me, even with its teary-eyed woe, and I do so love angsty people, but only in music and fiction), and, on loop, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, and a decade later, Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
But my persistent, and somewhat secret, love has always been Broadway musicals, specifically from the 1930s to the 1960s, plus Stephen Sondheim (why wouldn’t you include him what’s wrong with you). Secret because who the heck listened to musicals FFS, and why would you when you can’t even afford a theater ticket and Cats is finally closing at the Winter Garden Theatre? But I did anyway, because musicals were mostly escape. They were airy and flighty, and unconcerned but for the romance between impossibly beautiful people perpetually lit by starlight. Even in daylight, they shimmered dew.
Then came Rodgers and Hammerstein, and musicals changed. There was the one everyone knows, with a fetching Christopher Plummer (RIP) in a role he despised, and an effervescent Julie Andrews in the ideal pixie bob with a fringe on top. Then there were others, like The King and I, Oklahoma!, and the one musical I hated for such a very long time for its seeming fetishism of Pacific Islanders, South Pacific (and its cringey successor, Flower Drum Song, which I loathe — loathe! — to this very day, but hooray for actual Asians in the cast…I guess). But I came to like South Pacific only for less than a handful of songs (please check this Carnegie Hall concert performance with the magnificent Brian Stokes Mitchell), but loved for one in particular, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”, because it said everything in those few lines a host of things everyone knew. That song solidified my love for musical theater, beyond the swirling hems of foxtrots and cheerful beats of tap shoes. Musical theater could hold more, so much more, at the very heart of it.
A digital drawing of Anna Leonowens and (the hot) King of Siam. (Procreate on iPad Pro)
And many of those old Broadway numbers were covered by jazz musicians (and not in the Poopzikle way, mostly), and I listened to those too, with almost equal relish. But hardly anyone covered “Carefully Taught,” at least none that I heard to popular extent. Quelle suprise.
But a year or so into college, a friend made me sit and listen to a song. She made me sit, without doing anything else, with no other distraction, and listen to one song: an active, purposeful listen.
A line drawing of Billie Holiday and her iconic gardenia blossom. (Fountain pen on paper.)
It was Billie Holiday, singing “Strange Fruit”.
Written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish English teacher in New York deeply affected by a photograph of a lynching in Indiana, the poem was eventually set to music and made its way through the New York nightclub scene to its most significant and renowned association.
Billie Holiday closed every nightclub session with this song, to a hushed audience and waitstaff, and only one spotlight. I know no other song with a singer so closely woven — so interminably, so finely — that any other version sounded trite, flimsy, nothing but a faint, borrowed shadow of a far greater glory.
And only Billie Holiday could sing this song this way.
That plaintive line in her phrasing, that thin tremor, the pauses, the held note, the strained rasp of her voice in later years — she didn’t possess the vocal range of many of her peers, but none could accomplish what she could convey in the softest, most subtle shift of tone, just a step behind a note — all at once, with deadly grace, to comfort and devastate you.
So while “Carefully Taught” was flexible enough to shape itself to the abilities of its current performer, “Strange Fruit” seemed fit for only one.
But these two songs hold so much more than one expects of any tune barely three minutes long. For you, dear Reader, I’m sure, there are touchstones of music that turned and tore a piece of your mind, mended and scarred your ears, soothed and scraped the most delicate surfaces of your skin.
These two songs were my touchstones, and they were about the same thing, at the very heart of it.