The horrific and brutal truth behind Billie Holiday’s legendary song

July 24, 2024

(Credits: William P. Gottlieb)

Wed 24 July 2024 2:00, United Kingdom

First recorded in 1939, Billie Holiday’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” would preoccupy the United States for the next twenty years, amplifying demands for civil equality and the call for a movement against white supremacy to such an extent that the FBI felt it necessary to suppress the song and its author.

The title began as a simple poem by a New York City teacher named Abel Meeropol. As it turned out, Meeropol not only inadvertently provided Holiday with her most poignant and important material, but also inspired one of his high school English students, James Baldwin, to become one of the most important English-language writers of the 20th century.

Yet how did a 12-line poem about “strange” or “bitter” fruit come to have such significance in the civil rights movement? A song about fruit hanging from poplar trees, strange as it may be, may not seem like a particularly significant image. But when the grim reality of the song’s meaning is revealed, there is no grimmer image in the history of modern music.

The fruit described is not a natural phenomenon, not a “harvest” of the trees that “bear” it. It is something extremely unnatural and unspeakably inhuman.

So where did the “fruit” come from?

The second line of the song gives a hint as to what it is really about, describing the poplar trees as covered in “blood.” The third line then gets straight to the point, speaking of “swinging black bodies.” Meeropol’s wife had urged him to change the original draft of his poem and make this reference more direct so that the metaphor could not be misunderstood.

The lyrics describe the bodies of African Americans lynched by white racists in the southern United States. This horrific crime against humanity was a relatively common occurrence at the time the song was written. Between the late 19th century and World War II, nearly 5,000 people were lynched in the United States. Three-quarters of them were black.

The eighth line mentions “the smell of burnt flesh,” because in many cases, the lynch mobs were not satisfied with simply hanging their victims from tree branches after beating them to a pulp. Many of the bodies were then burned, mutilating the flesh, and the victims’ families could not even give them a dignified burial.

This dark chapter of American history is thankfully closed, but its legacy lives on in the institutional oppression that the country’s black population still faces today. And many black families in the South have relatives from the last century who themselves suffered such atrocities. This is why works of such cultural significance as Strange Fruit are remembered and revered today. They are an invaluable weapon against these kinds of horrors that are once again rearing their heads in society.