Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”

By SoDak

In 1939, Billie Holiday started performing “Strange Fruit.” While she feared backlash, she was committed to singing this song, which often brought her to tears, that condemned racism and lynching. Abel Meeropol, under the name Lewis Allen, penned “Strange Fruit” as a poem, after he saw a photograph from 1930 that depicted the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana. After he published the poem in 1937, with the title “Bitter Fruit,” he put the poem to music. It became a popular protest song in New York City. But it is Holiday’s version that stands as legendary and still speaks to issues today. 

Holiday asked Columbia, her recording label, for permission to record “Strange Fruit.” The label refused, indicating that such an incendiary song would result in negative reactions and loss of record sales. Holiday persisted approaching her friend at a jazz label. They worked out a deal with Columbia, which released Holiday to record for one session with a different label.  

“Strange Fruit” is immediately chilling, as Holiday sings “Southern trees bear strange fruit /

Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

In 1895, Ida B. Wells published The Red Record, detailing how a system of racial hierarchy and inequality was enforced through a system of lynching in the United States. Lynching became so normal that there was an accepted lynch law, where blacks were simply killed. Large white crowds gathered to participate and observe. There was no fear of reprisal, as there were no inquiries or investigations into these incidents. Postcards were made and sold depicting these horrors (see https://withoutsanctuary.org and watch the short film), further normalizing such violence and hatred. In documenting and exposing this violence, Wells wrote, “Perhaps the most characteristic feature of this record of lynch law for the year 1893, is the remarkable fact that five human beings were lynched and that the number was considered of so little importance that the powerful press bureaus of this country did not consider the matter of enough importance to ascertain the causes for which they were hanged. It tells the world, with perhaps greater emphasis than any other feature of the record, that Lynch Law has become so common in the United States that finding of the dead body of a Negro, suspended between heaven and earth to the limb of a tree, is of so slight importance that neither the civil authorities nor press agencies consider the matter work investigating.” Wells devoted her life to opposing racial capitalism and repression. 

Through the decades, this system of violence has continued—hangings, burnings, beatings, shootings. Holiday marks these ongoing horrors: “Pastoral scene of the gallant south / Them big bulging eyes and the twisted mouth / Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh / Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.” In this short song, in anguish and defiance, Holiday powerful concludes: “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 the trees to drop / Here is a strange and bitter crop.” “Strange Fruit” is now recognized as one of the important songs of the twentieth century and remains Holiday’s biggest selling record. It produces goosebumps and tears on every listen. 

Lynching was so widespread and common that Mark Twain, in disgust, in 1901, indicated that the country should be known as the “United States of Lyncherdom.” In the 1940s, Oliver Cromwell Cox, in Caste, Class and Race, stressed that the threat of lynching was embedded in the state, “in the whip hand of the ruling class,” serving as the means to impose racial oppression and to maintain the status quo of white supremacy. A militarized police force, as part of national policy, terrorizes people of color. As Cornel West recently explained, the murder of George Floyd by police is “a lynching at the highest level.” The list of victims is very, very long. “A strange and bitter crop” is still present and sanctioned by the state.

Here’s to the rebellions and protests against racial oppression, police violence, and the neofascist Donald Trump. Justice now!