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"Strange Fruit" is a song written and composed by Abel Meeropol (under his pseudonym Lewis Allan) and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. The lyrics were drawn from a ...
Meeropol set his poem to music, renaming it "Strange Fruit". He performed it at a labor meeting in Madison Square Garden. In 1939 it was performed, recorded and popularized by American singer Billie Holiday. [9] The song reached 16th place on the charts in July 1939, and has since been recorded by numerous artists, continuing into the 21st century.
Meeropol wrote the anti-lynching poem "Strange Fruit" (1937), first published as "Bitter Fruit" in a teacher union publication. He later set it to music. The song was recorded and performed by Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. [6] Holiday notes in the book Lady Sings the Blues that she co-wrote the music to the song with Meeropol and Sonny White.
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Today, “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday, “A Change is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke and “What’s Going On,” Marvin Gaye remain relevant to Black America.
She later said that the imagery of the song reminded her of her father's death and that this played a role in her resistance to performing it. For her performance of "Strange Fruit" at the Café Society, she had waiters silence the crowd when the song began. During the song's long introduction, the lights dimmed and all movement had to cease.
"The Hanging Tree" received comparisons to other songs such as "Tom Dooley", [19] Billie Holiday's 1939 ballad "Strange Fruit" (which also includes references to hanging and trees), [16] and the civil rights protest song "We Shall Overcome" [16] as well as a passage from Frederick Douglass's memoir My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) about African ...
The 1920s and 30s also saw a marked rise in the number of songs which protested against racial discrimination, such as Fats Waller's "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue" in 1929, and the anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit" by Lewis Allan and performed and recorded by Billie Holiday, which contains the lyrics "Southern trees bear strange ...