How Billie Holiday and Billy Crystal’s Uncle Made Black Music History with ‘Strange Fruit’

Billy Crystal’s connection to Billie Holiday reveals a pivotal moment in music history. Discover how his uncle, Milt Gabler, produced ‘Strange Fruit,’ a protest song that became a cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement.

Key Figures and Historical Context

• Billie Holiday was one of the most influential singers of the 20th century, with hits including “God Bless the Child” and “Lover Man.”
• Billy Crystal’s uncle Milt Gabler was a record producer who launched the label Commodore Records in the 1930s.
• The four episodes of the docuseries Black & Jewish America: An Interwoven History premieres on PBS between Feb. 3 and Feb. 24.

Billy Crystal is known for comedic movies like 1989’s When Harry Met Sally… and 1991’s City Slickers, and for hosting the Academy Awards nine times, making him second only to 19-time Oscar host Bob Hope. But the Emmy-winning Hollywood legend also has an unexpected major tie to Black history.

His uncle Milt Gabler produced one of jazz legend Billie Holiday’s seminal singles: “Strange Fruit” — a protest song that became a musical cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the 20th century. It’s one of many examples of the divine connection between Black and Jewish Americans.

The Collaboration That Changed Music

The four-episode PBS docuseries Black & Jewish America: An Interwoven History, which premiered on Feb. 3 with the first episode, explores the histories of Black people and Jewish people in the United States and how those histories have diverged and intersected over the course of centuries.

“By the 1930s, the rise of facism in Europe drew Black and Jewish Americans even closer, as Nazi propaganda borrowed pages from the Jim Crow playbook,” the docuseries’ host and executive producer Henry Louis Gates Jr. says at the beginning of episode 2, “Strange Fruit.” He adds, “After the Holocaust, there was a heightened awareness of their shared suffering as well as a growing recognition of their differences.”

Jewish people were at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement alongside Black Americans, and many of popular music’s mid-century classics were collaborations between Black and Jewish talent. For example, the greatest hits by the Black vocal group The Coasters, including “Yakety Yak” and “Poison Ivy,” were written by the Jewish songwriting team Jerome Leiber and Michael Stoller.

Then there was Atlantic Records legend Jerry Wexler, who produced landmark classics for Ray Charles (“What’d I Say”), Aretha Franklin (“Respect”) and Wilson Pickett (“Mustang Sally”). And Dionne Warwick made her mark in the ’60s with a string of hits written by the Jewish songwriting duo Burt Bacharach and Hal David, which Carole King and her husband Gerry Goffin helped craft classics by the Shirelles (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow”), Little Eva (“The Loco-Motion”) and Franklin (“[You Make Me Feel Like] A Natural Woman”).

The Legacy of “Strange Fruit”

Decades earlier, Holiday and Gabler made history with “Strange Fruit.” As the documentary explains in a clip shared exclusively with PEOPLE, Gabler first heard “Strange Fruit” when Holiday herself sang it in Gabler’s family store, in hopes that Milk would produce a recording of it.

“According to him, she sang it in the store a cappella,” Crystal, 77, says of his uncle and Holiday in the clip. “And he said to me, ‘I just cried like a baby. I said, We gotta record this thing. I don’t care if we make a buck.’ “

Gabler recorded “Strange Fruit” on his Commodore record label after pretty much every other label turned it down.

“A White Jewish producer, and the greatest Black jazz singer of all-time, and an all-Black band, working together to produce art,” Crystal adds. “Isn’t that the metaphor for what we should be and where we should be at? Why can’t the world be like this?”

Holiday performed it as both a mournful hymn and a political lamentation about the harsh realities of life in the Jim Crow South during the first part of the 20th century. “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black body swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,” she sings in the first verse.

The song, released as a single in 1939, sparked outrage among racists in and out of power and made Holiday a target of the U.S. government. Banned by radio stations around the country, it nonetheless sold a million copies and became the biggest hit of her career.

The Enduring Impact of Billie Holiday and Milt Gabler

Abel Meeropol, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was working as a school teacher in New York City when he wrote “Strange Fruit” as a poem, and he published it in 1937. He was inspired by a photo that showed the lynching of two Black teenagers in Indiana in 1930, and he later set his poem to music.

Gabler went on to produce a number of landmark recordings, including Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” the song widely credited as launching rock & roll into the mainstream in 1955. Both Holiday, who died in 1959 at age 44, and Gabler were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 2000 and 1993, respectively.

The obituary that ran in The New York Times when Gabler died in 2001 at age 90 underscored his enduring bond with Holiday. “At the time of his death,” it read, “there was just one photo by his bedside. It was of Billie Holiday.”

Conclusion

“Strange Fruit,” the second episode of Black & Jewish America: An Interwoven History premieres on PBS Feb. 10 at 9 p.m. ET. Episodes 3 and 4 will follow on Feb. 17 and 24, respectively, at the same time. All episodes will be available to stream on PBS.org, the PBS app and PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel.

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