herself wrote "Strange Fruit" after personally observing a lynching.
singing "Strange Fruit", the poem written by Abel Meeropol.
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.arts.poetry.comments/msg/5fa9c8b88c64ebfb?hl=en
Yes, I went through a stretch of being strongly influenced by Holiday,
around the time of Lou Reed's "Berlin" (also featured homage to Lady
Day) & my Ma Rainey studies. This was before I met you, as with Eno,
so we may have never had time to touch on that. The thread above I
discuss much of that, as well as the original poem the song came from,
& other topics you're referring to, ie the local racism on both sides
of the river.
"Strange Fruit" was a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high-
school
teacher from the Bronx, about the lynching of two black men. He published
under the pen name Lewis Allan.
"In the poem, Meeropol expressed his horror at lynchings, possibly after
having seen Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas
Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. He published the poem in 1936 in
The New York Teacher, a union magazine. Though Meeropol/Allan had often
asked others (notably Earl Robinson) to set his poems to music, he set
"Strange Fruit" to music himself. The piece gained a certain success as a
protest song in and around New York. Meeropol, his wife, and black vocalist
Laura Duncan performed it at Madison Square Garden. .
"Strange Fruit
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body 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 magnolia 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."
Abel Meeropol
Yeah, Strange Fruit was on the first Billie Holiday album I bought, a
collection from Columbia obviously put out to cash in on the Diana
Ross film that was current, then... from that eerie clarinet at the
start, and Billie's halting & dramatic, spooky reading, added to the
fact that in 1975 where I was growing up, the events described were
still being repeated less than a decade before, and probably even
right then, if the details were known.