Strange Fruit

Artist

Billie Holiday

Album

The Complete Commodore & Decca Masters

Genre

Jazz

Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, wrote "Strange Fruit" as a poem in 1937 and published it under the name Lewis Allan. He said a photograph of a lynching had haunted him for days. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Encyclopaedia Britannica identify it as Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930. Billie Holiday first sang it in 1939 at Café Society in Greenwich Village, New York's first integrated nightclub. She closed her set with it, in a darkened room, with a single spotlight on her face. Columbia would not record it. The label released her from her contract for one session, and she took the song to Milt Gabler at Commodore, who cut it on April 20, 1939. Gabler thought it ran short, so pianist Sonny White improvised an opening. It sold a million copies and became the biggest seller of her career. Holiday wrote later that the song reminded her of her father. Clarence Holiday, a guitarist, died in Dallas in 1937, and she understood that hospitals there had turned him away while he was dying of pneumonia. "I have to keep singing it," she wrote, "not only because people ask for it, but because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South." Documentary research by Lewis Porter has since found that Clarence was taken directly to a Dallas hospital and treated, as Black patients there were, in a segregated basement ward. She sang it for the rest of her life. She died on July 17, 1959, at 44, in a hospital bed where federal narcotics agents had placed her under arrest weeks earlier.