Song: "Strange Fruit"Artist: Billie Holiday (also sung by Nina Simone, Jeff Buckley and many others)
Year: 1939
Label: Commodore
Players: Billie Holiday - singer; Abel Meeropol - songwriter, (as Lewis Allan)
It was this photograph [warning, do NOT click if easily nauseated, NSFW] that prompted Jewish highschool teacher Abel Meeropol to write a the poem that would become my favorite protest song. In the picture, two African-American men are hanging from a tree, while white men and women mill around below, some pointing, none terrible shocked or offended. These men were lynched, not tried and condemed. they were murdered, because of the color of there skin.
Billie Holiday is a master of the American songbook, her voice infused with emotion both elating and depressing. But on "Strange Fruit" she is not downcast over her man's wandering eye, but by the injustice commited against her people, by her fellow man. It is one song that, to this very day, fills my heart with anger, fills my eyes with tears and makes my fists to clench. How can we have done this? How can people be so violent, so evil? I know it was a different time and place, but that can't even begin to make it right.
It's not just the subject matter that cuts into my heart, but the way it is presented with the evoctive lyrics: "Scent of magnolia, so clean and fresh/then the sudden smell of burning flesh" Just hearing that, it takes you there. To a place, so real, so horrible. It sickens you. Or at the very least, it should. "Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck/for the rain to gather/for the wind to pluck/for the sun to rot/for the trees to drop/here is a strange and bitter crop"
The song inspired Bob Dylan, was inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame and named Time's Song Of The Century.
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