Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit

Billie Holiday's best-selling record, Strange Fruit was a sombre blues account of racism and lynchings in the south of America. Its confronting first line "Southern tree bears a strange fruit" evokes powerful images of the bodies of African-Americans swinging from the trees in which they've been lynched.

Like many songs Strange Fruit began its life as a poem, penned by New York schoolteacher Abel Meeropol after he was appalled by an image of two lynched Negros. Holiday put it into music and debuted it in performance in 1939 and it quickly became a popular number in her sets - although singing it sometimes distressed her or led her to fear retribution. Time magazine in 1939 derided the song as propaganda for the NAACP - ironically, sixty years later Time would select it as the 'song of the century'.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Billie Holiday
• Strange Fruit
• lynching
• racism
• USA

[lonnie1328]

All humans need to understand and appreciate the struggle of the Black race. Unlike any group, Black have faced direct and indirect social and economic pressures. Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" is an example of 3 hundred plus years of Black treatment by the White Race.

[gossipishate]

All hate is bad. Whether white hate blacks or blacks hate whites or any other skin colour hating another skin colour.

[dimpleseve]

Thank you for posting this. we may no longer have legendary performers on this earth but we have them on film and video to enjoy!!!!

[Sequoya]

A very haunting and brilliant song. I've never seen her perform it before and I'm in awe. Thank you

[toftmf]

Interesting to read in your notes how the American media [and public] has evolved.