UB Film Spotlight: ‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday’ | Available Now on Hulu

Now Streaming Today on Hulu “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.”
UB Spotlights Andra Day‘s first major film role.

To celebrate the release of the film, Verve is reissuing her albums Music For Torching, Velvet Mood and At Jazz At The Philharmonic on March 5th.

From today’s lens, it is hard for some to imagine the United States government tormenting anyone for just singing a song.

Certainly not ‘Strange Fruit,’ Billie Holiday’s great protest song against lynching. What crime could the United States government possibly find in amplifying the senseless killing of Black people, Black men specifically, for nothing more than the color of their skin Why would any entity of the federal government be outraged over a now classic American protest song with the lyric “Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees” The harsh truth is Jim Crow wasn’t just in the South.

No amount of fame could save her from the punishment reserved for her refusal to stop singing “Strange Fruit.” Unable to outrun her demons, she turned to drugs early in her life to numb the pain of her rough childhood, her unfortunate choice in men and just the price of living Black and female in America. And the government, her government, used her weakness, her drug addiction, against her.

Fighting unfairly, Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger, who founded this country’s infamous “War on Drugs,” hired Jimmy Fletcher, a Black man, to infiltrate her jazz circles and take her down. But their plan hit a major snag when Jimmy did the unthinkable and fell in love with her. It wasn’t enough to save her from a horrific death chained to a hospital bed surrounded by federal agents. Did the government kill Lady Day The United States vs. Billie Holiday dares to uncover that truth.

Racism was all over the nation and few knew that as well as Billie Holiday. As a woman born Black and poor with extremely limited options in Jim Crow America, survival, in and of itself, was a win. Becoming the iconic Lady Day, beloved by both Black and white Americans for her talent, did not shield her.

Directed by Academy Award nominee Lee Daniels, with a screenplay written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, based on the chapter “The Black Hand” on Billie Holiday in Johann Hari’s 2015 bestselling book, Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, and introducing Grammy-nominated singer Andra Day in a mesmerizing and show stopping performance as Billie Holiday.

Trevante Rhodes, from the Academy Award winning film Moonlight, stars as Jimmy Fletcher, with Tony Award nominee Da’Vine Joy Randolph from Ghost: The Musical and Dolemite Is My Name, Golden Globe and Emmy nominee Natasha Lyonne from Orange Is the New Black and Russian Doll, Mudbound’s Garrett Hedlund and Rob Morgan, as well as Star’s Miss Lawrence and Evan Ross, along with Everybody Hates Chris and Dear White People’s Tyler James Williams and Sylvie’s Love Tone Bell.

“Iconic jazz singer and drug addict” is how Billie Holiday is too often described. Her death in 1959 at just age 44, many believe, was due to her own self-destruction—drugs, alcohol and toxic men. In a word, she was tragic. Hero is nowhere in the picture. Neither is civil right’s leader. But Billie Holiday was indeed these things and more.

Defying federal government’s orders to stop singing “Strange Fruit,” a song protesting the lynching of Black people, probably led to her early death. Inspired by and based upon the chapter, “Black Hand,” from British writer Johann Hari’s revelatory 2015 New York Times bestseller, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, The United States vs. Billie Holiday tells the story of a defiant Holiday who would not buckle to white supremacy.

“When you think of civil rights leaders, you think of Rosa Parks, or you think of Martin Luther King, and if you want to get a little edgy, you think of Malcolm X. But you really don’t think of Billie Holiday,” says Academy Award nominee director/producer Lee Daniels. “One thinks of her as a singer, a jazz singer, an addict.” J. Edgar Hoover was not the only government official with documented misuse of power. Harry J. Anslinger, who led the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a precursor to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), under five U.S. Presidents–Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, abused his power as well.

As the architect of “the war on drugs,” Anslinger, who targeted jazz musicians for marijuana use, bullied Billie Holiday to not sing “Strange Fruit” and used her drug and alcohol challenges as an excuse to go after her. Jailing a person for singing a song seems a bit extreme by today’s standards. But the 2020s were not the 1930s. Social protest songs were far from the order of the day.

In 1939, when Billie Holiday first performed “Strange Fruit” protesting lynching, at New York City’s first integrated nightclub, Café Society, in front of a mostly white audience and later recorded it, Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow” and Louis Armstrong’s “When the Saints Come Marching In” were the year’s biggest hits. That said, when Billie Holiday began singing “Strange Fruit,” popular music artists and entertainers were not outspoken in their music.

When Billie Holiday first heard the lyrics of Strange Fruit, it reminded her of her father, who died when he was turned away from a hospital because he was Black. So at 23, she began fearlessly singing the song at Café Society. Fearing retaliation and censure in the South, her producer John Hammond refused to record it and Columbia Records, to whom she was contracted, refused to release it. They did allow her to record it for another label.

After hearing Holiday sing “Strange Fruit” a cappella, Milt Gabler, who owned alternative jazz label Commodore, produced Billie Holiday singing the song, releasing it in 1939 via a deal with Vocalion Records. That recording went on to sell over a million copies, becoming Holiday’s best-selling release. In 1944, she recorded it again for Commodore. The United States vs. Billie Holiday highlights how Billie Holiday refused to stop singing “Strange Fruit” and how she paid with her life.