The mind-blowing song David Crosby called his “introduction to racism”
Pioneering the genres of folk rock and psychedelic rock in the 1960s, David Crosby definitely made a substantial mark on the face of popular music. His work with The Byrds and later with the supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash cemented his position as one of the most valued songwriters of the decade, with fans still enjoying his tunes to this day.
Crosby and the band set themselves apart from the rock crowd with a more sincere view of the world. Born out of the folk explosion, Crosby and his counterparts found themselves speaking truth to power over and over again. Their dedication to protest helped cement their position as giants of culture.
Through his time with The Byrds, popularising folk and psychedelic rock, Crosby also became noted for his outspoken political views. The musician became an archetypal figure of the countercultural student activism movement in the 1960s, protesting against US military involvement in Vietnam and questioning the Warren Commission into the assassination of JFK whilst onstage with The Byrds in 1967 – something which did not go down too well with his fellow bandmates. Of course, one of the biggest socio-political issues of the 1960s was the fight for civil rights, something which did not escape Crosby.
Growing up in 1940s Los Angeles, Crosby must have witnessed racism regularly in his early years. Oppressive Jim Crow laws and segregation remained rife throughout the country during his upbringing, and the movement towards a widespread civil rights movement certainly gained traction throughout the decade. According to Crosby, though, his eyes were opened to the horrors of racial discrimination through music with the song ‘Strange Fruit’.
‘Strange Fruit’ was first recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939 and is widely considered among the most notable protest songs of all time. Based on a poem by Abel Meeropol, the song protests the horrific lynchings of Black Americans. Lynching had been commonplace in the American South from a time predating the Civil War and found a resurgence in the early 20th century as a result of the film Birth of a Nation, which repopularised the Ku Klux Klan.
Although Holiday’s version remains the definitive recording of ‘Strange Fruit’, it was the 1949 cover by Josh White that Crosby remembers best. “I remember hearing the Brandenburg Concertos a lot because my mum used to play that stuff all the time, but I remember folk music most vividly,” he said in 2008, “She once played me a Josh White recording called ‘Strange Fruit’, and I couldn’t understand what it was about. When I asked her, she started crying and sat me down and explained it was Black people being hung from trees in the South.”
The White track had a huge impact on Crosby as a young man. “Learning the word ‘lynching’ was my introduction to racism. I was a little kid, and it scared me, as I didn’t know human beings did that to each other.” Undoubtedly, his later politics and activism were clearly influenced by this sense of man’s inhumanity to man that he had become aware of after hearing ‘Strange Fruit’.
Corbsy would use this and the world around him to inspire his own stance on the social crises that seemed to litter the decades. He would regularly turn up for those struggling and found himself on the right side of history on numerous occasions.
Listen to the track below.
