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Strange Fruit
Title: Strange Fruit
Artist: Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra
Release Date: 5/1/1939
Genre: Jazz
Song Writers: Abel Meeropol, Lewis Allan
Publisher: Commodore Records
[Verse 1]
Southern trees bear a 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
[Verse 2]
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
[Verse 3]
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
Billie Holiday is an artist who is not explicitly mentioned in Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying, but she most certainly would have been playing on Jefferson’s radio in 1948. Perhaps, Jefferson heard Billie’s beautiful voice singing about the strange crop in the southern trees.
Strange Fruit (1939) is a song about the dark history of lynching in the United States. Billie sings of a time when lynching was at its height, and black bodies were treated as disposable objects. On the surface, Strange Fruit’s lynching narrative seems a little too far in the past to be of significance to the story of Jefferson. Lynching, however, has had an everchanging role in the history of America, particularly the American South. What started as an informal policing of black bodies by the majority white population during the times of slavery, did not end there. Lynching can be defined as the public execution of individuals which is not regulated through the judicial system.
