1. In 1937 Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from New York, saw a photograph of
the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. Meeropol later recalled how the
photograph "haunted me for days" and inspired the writing of the poem, Strange
Fruit. Meeropol, a member of the American Communist Party, using the pseudonym,
Lewis Allan, published the poem in the New York Teacher and later, the Marxist
journal, New Masses.
After seeing Billie Holiday perform at the club, Café Society, in New York, Meeropol
showed her the poem. Holiday liked it and after working on it with Sonny White
turned the poem into the song, Strange Fruit. The record made it to No. 16 on the
charts in July 1939. However, the song was denounced by Time Magazine as "a
prime piece of musical propaganda" for the National Association for the
Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).
Meeropol remained active in the American Communist Party and after the execution
of Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg he adopted their two sons. He taught at
the De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx for 27 years, but continued to write
songs, including the Frank Sinatra hit, The House I Live In.
Rubin Stacy, lynched in Fort Lauderdale on 19th July, 1935

2. 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.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
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 a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
As Billie Holiday later told the story, a single gesture by a patron at New York's Café
Society, in Greenwich Village, changed the history of American music in early 1939,
the night when she first sang "Strange Fruit."
Café Society was New York's only truly integrated nightclub outside Harlem, a place
catering to progressive types with open minds. But Holiday was to recall that even
there she was afraid to sing this new song, and regretted it, at least momentarily,
when she first did. "There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished," she later
said. "Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was
clapping."
The applause grew louder and less tentative as "Strange Fruit" became a nightly
ritual for Holiday, then one of her signature songs, at least where it could be safely
performed. And audiences have continued to applaud this disturbing ballad, unique in
Holiday's oeuvre and in the American popular-song repertoire, as it has left its mark
on generations of writers, musicians, and listeners, both black and white. The late
jazz writer Leonard Feather once called "Strange Fruit" "the first significant protest in
words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism." Jazz musicians still speak of
it with a mixture of awe and fear - "When Holiday recorded it, it was more than
revolutionary," said the drummer Max Roach - and perform it almost gingerly. "It's like
rubbing people's noses in their own shit," said Mal Waldron, the pianist who
accompanied Holiday in her final years.
A few years back a British music publication, Q Magazine, named "Strange Fruit" one
of 10 songs that actually changed the world. And like any revolutionary act, it
encountered great resistance. Holiday, like the black folksinger Josh White, who
began performing it a few years after Holiday did, was abused, sometimes physically,
by irate nightclub patrons. Columbia, the company that produced Holiday's records,
refused to touch it; even progressive radio stations would not play it. And again like
revolutionary acts, the song has generated its fair share of mythology. Some of the
song's sadness seems to have stuck to Billie Holiday ever after. "She really was
happy only when she sang," the jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason wrote. "The rest of the
time she was a sort of living lyric to the song 'Strange Fruit,' hanging, not on a poplar
tree, but on the limbs.