BILLIE HOLIDAY

"Strange Fruit" is the title of a song made famous when it was performed in 1939 at the Cafe Society nightclub in New York by the great jazz singer Billie Holiday. It was a surprisingly unusual song for a cabaret because it was an overt song of African American protest, a message that had heretofore been hidden in spirituals and the blues. The words of "Strange Fruit" refer to lynchings, the killing of black people by mobs in the South. Nearly 4,000 people were lynched in the fifty years before 1939. Most of these murders were by hanging, and the song's lyrics dramatically describe bodies hanging from trees like fruit: "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." This was a protest song aimed directly at white people, and some walked out of Cafe Society, an integrated Greenwich Village club designed for intellectuals and political liberals. Some people thought "Strange Fruit" was not appropriate entertainment, some were overcome by the searing power of the song's imagery, some were simply fearful of expressing protest. A few African Americans were unhappy because they felt it only portrayed blacks as victims. Columbia, which recorded Billie Holiday's songs, refused to record this one. She found a small company, but many juke boxes and radio stations, including BBC, still would not play it. "Strange Fruit's" words and music were written by Abel Meeropol, a New York City schoolteacher, under the name Lewis Allen. Perhaps Holiday was able to put the feeling into the lyrics that she did because her own background was one of terrible abuse, poverty, and suffering. Her own father had died in Texas because he could not get proper medical treatment, and she continued to feel that pain. "Strange Fruit" became her last set every night at Cafe Society. The house was silenced, a single spotlight found her face, and with her unmatched phrasing, timing, timbre, and sincerity, the 24-year-old Holiday combined dignity with anger to utter the stark words, "And the sudden smell of burning flesh.... Here is a strange and bitter crop."