"Strange Fruit" is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday, who released her first recording of it in 1939, the year she first sang it. Written by the teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem, it exposed American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans. Such lynchings had occurred chiefly in the South but also in all other regions of the United States. The writer, Abel, set it to music and with his wife and the singer Laura Duncan, performed it as a protest song in New York venues, including Madison Square Garden.
The song has been covered by artists, as well as inspiring novels, other poems and other creative works. In 1978 Holiday's version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Famous quotes containing the words strange and/or fruit:
“The thinking person has the strange characteristic to like to create a fantasy in the place of the unsolved problem, a fantasy that stays with the person even when the problem has been solved and truth made its appearance.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, “Know thyself,” and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)