Strange+Fruit

"Strange Fruit" (Recorded 1939) Poem written by Abel Meeropol

Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies 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 magnolias, sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.



Columbia Records, the company Holiday was working with at that time, would not let her record this song because of its subject matter and because they did not think it would be a "commercial success." Musicians never talked about lynching. She went on to record hte song with another (much smaller) label, Commodore, and the song came to be considered one of her classics. This poem encouraged her to sing many more ballads.

"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.'' "It was so deeply felt. She was... 'unrelenting' is a good word for it. I thought, That's what art can do." ''I have to sing it,' she once said. 'Fruit' goes a long way in telling how they mistreat Negroes down South'" (ladyday.net).

The music is very powerful in explaining the tone of the story. The subject is obvious in its lyrics and its tone. The story itself is an awful story and Holiday portrays that extraordinarily well with her emotional intensity. Almost every critic or listener of hers describes her recording of the song as "haunting." She makes people //feel// how haunting the situation is. "Songs that promoted social activism were rare before the mid 1960s" (jimcrowhistory.org). Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" was one of the earliest of these songs.

"At a time when political protest (especially anti-racism) was not often expressed in musical form (and never lynching), the song depicted lynching in all of its brutality. The three short verses are all the more powerful for their understated and ironic language. The juxtaposition of a beautiful landscape with the scene of lynching, the smell of magnolias with that of burning flesh, the blossoms more typically associated with the Southern climate with the “strange fruit” produced by racial oppression—this imagery conjures up the essence of racist reaction. Racism in America stands indicted and exposed by these lines, with no need at all for a more didactic or agitational message...The song articulated the growing awareness and anger that was to find expression in the rise of the mass civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s" (wsws.org).

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