"Mrs Bryant came out, and she was headed towards her car and for some unknown reason … Emmett whistled at Carolyn Bryant. And it scared us so bad, we just couldn't get in our car fast enough to get out of town because in Mississippi, you don't whistle at a white woman. That was suicide. Instant death. But Emmett didn't know that."
Simeon Wright's frightening account of the last days of Emmett Till, his 14-year-old cousin visiting the family from Chicago, could stand alone as a must-hear documentary. The year 1955 isn't long enough ago to believe that the torture and lynching of a boy, eyes gouged out and his body thrown into a river, was the expected response to a wolf whistle. It's too bleak to endure. Which is why Maggie Ayre's Strange Fruit, about Billie Holiday's most famous song and its legacy, isn't just gripping – it's significant and necessary. A reminder that those horrors have been committed in living memory.
Had this opening episode of Radio 4's Soul Music been a straight biography of the song, it would still have been worth tuning in for: Holiday's signature set-closer was the first protest song to sell a million copies; she had to fight to record and release it. But instead, Ayre sensitively pulls together the stories connected to Strange Fruit – the smell of magnolia and burning flesh that sparked the American civil rights movement after Till's murder. Holiday and her well-documented pain become a footnote.
Abel Meeropol, the schoolteacher who wrote Strange Fruit after being horrified by pictures of people picnicking by trees with bodies swinging from them, is remembered by his son. One voice, Sylvia Wong Lewis, talks about the bitter irony of Strange Fruit and its unpopularity with black audiences. "It was familiar and we knew it … but it was such a sad song." Another, April Shipp, explains her handmade quilt, bearing the names of 5,000 lynched men, women and children. "I cried every day I worked on it … I still cry when I touch it. If no one else remembers their names, I remember them," she says. "I stand for these people."
