Billie Holiday sings "Strange Fruit"

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots
Black bodies swingin’ in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is the 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
- music and lyrics by Lewis Allan, ©1940

The tale of “Strange Fruit” – its genesis, impact and continuing relevance – is an amazingly complex one that weaves together the lives of African-Americans, immigrant Jews, anti-communist government officials, civil rights leaders, radical Leftist teachers and organizers, music publishers, record company executives and jazz musicians. In many ways, the story of the song and its writer and interpreters is as moving and oddly haunting as the song itself.

On December 28, 1938, Café Society opened its doors. Billie Holiday was an immediate sensation. Most of the clientele had never heard a singer like her before, and their enthusiastic response was instrumental in transforming her into a star.

Holiday wound up staying at Café Society for nine months, doing three shows a night. One night a customer named Abel Meeropol (his pen name was Lewis Allen), who was a poet union activist and schoolteacher, showed her a poem he had written. The poem, entitled “Strange Fruit,” was a protest against racial brutality. The words describe lynching in the South, and the strange fruit of the title refers to the bodies of lynched blacks hanging from the branches of a tree. Holiday was moved by the poem and, with the help of Sonny White, her accompanist at the time, she adapted it into a song.