Strange Fruit
Strange Fruit(2002)
- 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.
This haunting, poignant California Newsreel documentary focuses on the song Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday’s role in launching it in 1939, and the calumny of lynching which was, at the time, a subject that many whites cared not to acknowledge and many blacks dared not discuss openly.
That an American Jew wrote such a powerful assault on lynching reflected a commonality back then between Jews and African Americans in their desire for racial equality. Strange Fruit was a dramatic assault on the silence that had surrounded the lynching of countless thousands of African Americans, as well as a number of Jews. Billie Holiday first sang the song in New York City’s first non-Harlem integrated night club. Though radio stations refused to play it, Strange Fruit swiftly rose on the list of best-selling records.
At a Congressional hearing in 1940, the lyrics were included in the Congressional Record. Despite numerous anti-lynching bills, none were passed because of Southern opposition and President Roosevelt’s reticence to make this an overriding political priority.
Strange Fruit initially raised public awareness of the grotesqueness and savagery of a lynching tradition in which blacks often were killed at popular gatherings, and the murderers were never indicted. Some of the artists associated with the song subsequently were caught up in anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1940s and 1950s.
While Strange Fruit was not used in the forefront of the civil rights movement, it experienced a revival in later years both in the United States and in England. Recently it has become a discussion subject in high school and college courses.
Strange Fruit author Abel Meeropol (Lewis Allan), a long-time Bronx public school teacher, was both a poet and a song writer. His deep anger was reflected in the song’s lyrics. He also wrote The House We Live In, a song made famous by Frank Sinatra in 1945, though Sinatra omitted the phrase “neighbors white and black.” Meeropol, after the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, adopted the Rosenberg’s two sons.
Strange Fruit has been song by a diversity of performers, from Pete Seeger, Diana Ross, and Ella Fitzgerald to Sting and UB-40. Diana Ross as Billie Holiday, in Lady Sings the Blues (1972), exposed a national audience to Strange Fruit. Pete Seeger, in discussing Strange Fruit, said that “A song is a triumph of simplification …..Singing a song can be a reaffirmation.”
