If you click here you will get to an excellent BBC article on Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday. It was recorded 80 years ago today. Have a look and see what you think.
On 20 April 1939, the jazz singer Billie Holiday stepped into a studio with an eight-piece band to record Strange Fruit. This jarring song about the horrors of lynching was not only Holiday’s biggest hit, but it would become one of the most influential protest songs of the 20th Century – continuing to speak to us about racial violence today.
It was named the song of the century by Time magazine in 1999, and the story of Strange Fruit’s conception has entered legend. Originally a poem called Bitter Fruit, it was written by the Jewish school teacher Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allen in response to lynching in US southern states. “I wrote Strange Fruit because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and I hate the people who perpetuate it,” Meeropol said in 1971.
