Strange Fruit
"Strange Fruit" is a song written and composed by Abel Meeropol (under his pseudonym Lewis Allan) and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. The lyrics were drawn from a poem by Meeropol, published in 1937.
The song protests the lynching of African Americans with lyrics that compare the victims to the fruit of trees. Such lynchings had reached a peak in the Southern United States at the turn of the 20th century, and most victims were African American. The song was described as "a declaration of war" and "the beginning of the civil rights movement" by Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun.
Meeropol set his lyrics to music with his wife Anne Shaffer and the singer Laura Duncan and performed it as a protest song in New York City venues in the late 1930s, including Madison Square Garden. Holiday's version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978. It was also included in the "Songs of the Century" list of the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2002, "Strange Fruit" was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
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