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What are the "Strange Fruit" mentioned by Billie Holliday in lyrics penned by Abel Meeropol?

Question #151901. Asked by odo5435.
Last updated Jan 02 2025.
Originally posted Jan 02 2025 10:42 AM.

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Answer has 5 votes
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postcards2go star
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Answer has 5 votes.

Currently voted the best answer.
Albert Meeropol, a Jewish teacher from The Bronx, wrote the song in 1937 after seeing photographs of lynched black men hanging from trees. Billie Holliday first sang the song in 1939. It became very popular (if that is the right word) during the civil rights movement a couple of decades later.

The lyrics are included in the link below.
"Strange Fruit" is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday, who first sang and recorded it in 1939. Written by a white, Jewish high school teacher from the Bronx and a member of the Communist Party, Abel Meeropol wrote it as a protest poem, exposing American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans. Such lynchings had occurred chiefly in the South but also in other regions of the United States.

Meeropol had seen Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. He published the poem under the title "Bitter Fruit" in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine. Though he had often asked others (notably Earl Robinson) to set his poems to music, he set "Strange Fruit" to music himself

In 1978 Holiday's version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.[4] It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

link https://billieholiday.com/signaturesong/strange-fruit/

Jan 02 2025, 1:18 PM
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