First Person Singular by Wendy Braitman

filed in What Gets Me Through the Day

A Song That Launched A Movement

April 20, 2011 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

On this day in 1939, Billie Holiday recorded Strange Fruit, which was written and originally performed by a Jewish schoolteacher in the Bronx, after seeing a disturbing photograph of a lynching. Holiday’s version had such impact that it eventually became an organizing tool, and the anthem for the anti-lynching movement in the U.S. Read the lyrics:

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies 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 magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is 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

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