WHEN jazz icon Billie Holiday performed her protest anthem Strange Fruit, her eerie vocals conjuring images of Black bodies hanging in nooses from the trees, the song would often leave her in pieces.
“It affects me so much I get sick,” she wrote in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. “It takes all the strength out of me.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation was less moved by her performance, however, deeming Strange Fruit – which bore out the history and horror of African-American slavery – an act of un-American sedition.
They set out to shut Holiday down at the height of her fame.
These events form the basis of director Lee Daniels’ new film The United States vs Billie Holiday, starring Andra Day in her Oscar-nominated role as the troubled pop legend.
Drawn from Johann Hari’s book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs,
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