The “Avalanche” After “Strange Fruit”
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
— “Strange Fruit” (written by Abel Meeropol)
Like the snow comin’ down the mountain
That landed on Wounded Knee
Nobody wants 2 take the weight
The responsibility
— “Avalanche” (written by Prince)
Blues, had, and still has, a certain weight in the psyches of its inventors. What I am proposing is that the alteration or repositioning of this weight in those same psyches indicates changes in the Negro that are manifested externally. I am proposing that the weight of the blues for the slave, the completely disenfranchised individual, differs radically from the weight of that same music in the psyches of most contemporary American Negroes….The one peculiar referent to the drastic change in the Negro from slavery to “citizenship” is his music.
[Introduction, Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It by Amiri Baraka]
Prince’s “Avalanche” is in response to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” Both are examples of “contemporary American Negroes” examining their citizenship and bearing “the weight” of America’s historical and generational antiblackness while working it all out in their artistic expressions. The titles are lyrics within the songs unattached to choruses from which traditional song titles often derive. Holiday’s “strange fruit” appears in the first verse. Prince’s “avalanche,” the second verse.
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Abel Meeropol wrote “Strange Fruit” under the alias Lewis Allan. He was born in New York to Russian Jewish immigrants and was inspired to write “Strange Fruit” after seeing a photo of a lynching. Meeropol wrote from a sympathetic observer’s point of view but apart from Holiday’s embodiment of each stanza, it would have been just another lovely poem about something horrible. Holiday was only in her early 20s during her original recording but she already had a lifetime of being on the receiving end of all the American systems in place to make “Strange Fruit” possible. The “southern trees,” “pastoral scene,” and “crows” in Holiday’s throat, once emerged, set the page they were written on aflame over and over again. Meeropol had a picture but Holiday had the lived experience and DNA memory necessary to turn his passive protest into the offensive question, “who hung the strange fruit from the poplar trees?”
Unlike “Strange Fruit,” “Avalanche” directly names the nemeses: Abraham Lincoln and John Hammond. In “Avalanche,” Prince takes two white men misidentified as allies to Black folk and recasts them as foes. There’s a Billie Holiday connection to both men. Holiday quit white bandleader Artie Shaw’s band after a racist incident at a New York hotel named after Lincoln. John Hammond, the white producer credited with “discovering” Holiday when she was 17, was also one of the biggest protesters against Holiday recording “Strange Fruit.” He called the song, “artistically, the worst thing that ever happened” to Holiday. After he kept her from recording it for Columbia Records, Holiday did the modern-day equivalent of going independent. The first recorded version of “Strange Fruit” in 1939 was under the Commodore Record Shop, run by Milt Gabler. Holiday got a one-session release from Columbia in order to do it. Fifty-five years later, Prince secured independent distribution of “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” through Bellmark Records. This was how he detoured contractual roadblocks with Warner Bros. which also included him changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol. Bellmark was started by Al Bell who once led the legendary Stax and Motown record labels. In “Avalanche,” when Prince accuses John Hammond of “lurking in the shadows,” he’s speaking from personal interactions with other John Hammonds who wanted Black artists like himself and Holiday to “sign [their] kingdom over” for counterfeit prosperity.
“Avalanche” is also Prince talking directly to Black people as evidenced by his use of “we woulda been born in slavery.” The first stanza sounds like his rebuttal to a Black person who said, “Lincoln freed the slaves” right before Prince started recording. “Avalanche” is for Black listeners. The avalanche represents white supremacy and the snowflakes that “claim innocence” are its participants.
For those of us who saw Prince perform “Avalanche” live during his One Nite Alone tour, his performance drew audible gasps and shouts of praise. I saw him April 4, 2002 at Woodruff Arts Center’s Symphony Hall during his stop in Atlanta, Georgia. Throughout the tour, Prince would say, “If you came to get your ‘Purple Rain’ on, you in the wrong house.” When he sang, “Abraham Lincoln was a racist who said you cannot escape from history” a Black man a few rows behind me yelled, “Yes!” before clapping hard. He wasn’t the only Black person responding this way. The shouting lasted the song’s entirety. Tears rimmed my lower eyelids.
The quote Prince uses to frame his characterization of Lincoln as a racist, comes from the 16th U.S. president’s State of the Union Address in 1862. In the speech’s last paragraph, Lincoln states: “Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.” This was a month before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which did not end slavery. Ultimately, people of African descent who were trafficked and enslaved in the U.S. set themselves free through generational acts of rebellion along with 200,000 Black Civil War veterans.
Sounding like an ecowomanist, Prince connects the decimation of the earth and all living beings within it–in this case Lakota and Black people–as the cause of current chaos. A blizzard followed the U.S. Army’s genocide of hundreds of Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. The temperature before the massacre was unseasonably warm for late December in South Dakota. The weather both forewarned and immediately responded to the violence that had just taken place.
Prince’s melancholic opening piano chords for “Avalanche” are more in line with Nina Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit” with a hint of Holiday’s original. The way he sings “history” has the same second-syllable anguish as Simone’s “Peaches!” at the end of “Four Women.” The choir of Princes who sing the chorus, ends on a more hopeful chord (Prince’s “responsibility”) than Holiday’s more uncertain “crop,” particularly on her Lady Sings the Blues recording. The sparse accompaniment of “Avalanche” matches the desolation of Simone’s “Strange Fruit.”
“Strange Fruit” is “believed to be the first phonograph recording in America of a popular song that has lynching as its theme” (according to David Margolick’s Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song). Prince followed in this protest/political tradition not just with “Avalanche” but also: “Baby” (teen pregnancy); “Annie Christian” (Atlanta Child Murders, gun control); “Sign o’ the Times” (AIDS, poverty, gang culture, addiction, misappropriation of taxpayers’ dollars); “Money Don’t Matter 2Night” (Gulf War, recession); “Right the Wrong” (Land Back, Indigenous prison sentencing disparities); “Cinnamon Girl” (Islamophobia, “war on terror” misnomer) to name a few.
What sets “Avalanche” apart is its straight-ahead Afrocentrism indicative of the album it’s on, 2001’s The Rainbow Children. The only metaphor is an avalanche which is apropos to describe an evil of great magnitude. Blackness became a consistent thread in Prince’s 21st century catalogue, showing up in songs like “Shades of Umber” and “Black Muse.” Following in Holiday’s footsteps, Prince is what Angela Davis would call a “cultural producer” with “enduring importance” who added his own lane to the “intersection of music and social consciousness” (Blues Legacies and Black Feminism).
