Take a moment and listen to this song. If you've heard it before, listen again. If you haven't, try to listen alone and take in the emotion.
<span id="selection-marker-1" class="redactor-selection-marker"></span>"Strange Fruit" is a harrowing blues piece about lynching. It's one of Billie Holiday's most famous songs and definitely one of her best. Her soft, raspy voice imbues the tragic lyrics with a beauty and languor, which the melancholy jazz instrumentation complements beautifully. Other versions of the song start with a wailing saxophone intro, but I prefer the sparse instruments here. Her performance is raw and the last few seconds of her discomfort are powerful.
This song was written by a Jewish-American man in 1937.
The story of Abel Meeropol is fascinating, especially since his legacy has largely been forgotten under Holiday's impressive cover. He was born in The Bronx of New York in February 14, 1903, and died on October 29, 1986. He was a teacher and writer, then became a songwriter after the success of "Strange Fruit." His two other songs are "The House I Live In," a piece notably performed by Frank Sinatra, and "Apples, Peaches, and Cherries." He wrote music under the pseudonym Lewis Allan, the names of his two stillborn children.
So why did this Jewish man write about lynching? The story goes that Abel saw a photograph of a lynching that disturbed him greatly. If you're willing to look at the picture, here it is. The corpses hanging from the tree are bloody, their clothes ripped, and their heads slack against the rope. What's more horrifying might be the large crowd casually looking on, grinning and pointing. Abel was so haunted by this image that he wrote a poem.
Originally titled "Bitter Fruit," the words were eventually put to music and renamed "Strange Fruit."
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin' 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 the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
Eventually, Billie Holiday heard the song and made her iconic cover. The song was named the "song of the century" by Time magazine in 1999. Many other covers have been made and the song continues to haunt people today.
Meeropol's life only became more interesting afterward, as he was a political activist and a Communist. In 1940, he was confronted by a New York committee that wanted to know if the Communist party had encouraged him to write the song. Though he got through the ordeal unscathed, he surfaced back onto the radar around 1953 when he adopted the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were executed for nuclear espionage, leaving their young boys orphaned. [1]
His life demonstrates a rich compassion and sympathy for the marginalized that I truly respect. I thought of the words to "Strange Fruit" last week when I looked through a book of lynchings. The images were brutal and I felt my confidence in human depravity painfully secured. Then I looked up the song's history. When I thought the song was Holiday's, I found the words deeply tragic. Now, I still see the horror, but I also see the humanity of a Jewish schoolteacher who wanted to share his horror of this national tragedy.
Abel Meeropol was a man who respectfully made something beautiful out of something terrible.
