Strange Record

Billie Holiday is a roly-poly young colored woman with a hump in her voice. Dance-hall crowds have heard her with Count Basie's Orchestra, radio audiences with Artie Shaw. She does not care enough about her figure to watch her diet, but she loves to sing. She also likes to listen to records of her singing.

Last spring Billie Holiday went to the Manhattan studios of the Vocalion Company, which has her under exclusive contract, to make a batch of records. One number, which she had been singing at a new downtown hotspot called Cafe Society, she particularly wanted on wax. Called Strange Fruit, it had been written by a libertarian New York public school teacher named Lewis Allan and its lyric was a poetic description of a lynching's terrible finale. Billie liked its dirgelike blues melody, was not so much interested in the song's social content. But Vocalion was. The record was never made.

Last week Manhattan's Commodore Music Shop--which not only makes and sells records but provides loafing room for most of the city's hot musicians--gave Billie and others a chance to hear her sing Strange Fruit, and also provided the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People a prime piece of musical propaganda. Unsqueamish, the Commodore had not balked at recording Teacher Allan's grim and gripping lyrics, which begin:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. . . .

Other popular records of June:

Rumpel-Stilts-Kin (Decca). The Merry Macks--three boys, one pretty girl and a left-handed trap drummer -- record the newest of the swift, adroit, hot vocalizations that they have been airing over the big networks for a year.

The Lamp is Low (Mildred Bailey; Vocalion), another tuneful theft from the semi-classics--this time from Ravel's solemn Pavan for a Dead Princess. Tommy Dorsey has made a dancier version for Victor.

Songs of Old California (four-record Decca album). Companion to Decca's New York song album, this one evokes California's past almost as well. Beginning with songs of the vaqueros, cowboys, and miners, the collection winds up with famed California Poet George Sterling's comic tribute to the State's molluscular mascot, Abalone.

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