Strange fruit, Elinore Harris

Today we’re going to present you guys the song “Strange Fruit” by Elinore Harris known as Billie Holiday or “Lady Day” who was an African American singer, born on April 7th, 1915 in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, and she passed away in July 17th, 1959 in New York city. She was considered one of the greatest jazz singers from the 1930s to the ‘50s known for her singing style that was deeply moving and individual and her dramatic intensity, which could make the most banal lyric profound.

The song “Strange Fruit” was popularized by Billie Holiday, who first sang and recorded it in 1939 but it was written by a white, Jewish high school teacher from the Bronx and a member of the Communist Party, Abel Meeropol who first wrote it as a protest poem called “Bitter Fruit”, he was moved to write it after he came across a 1930 photo that captured the lynching of two Black men in Indiana, an image that haunted him for days and prompted him to put pen to paper and expose American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans in the South of the US.

After he published the poem in a teachers union publication, Meeropol composed it into a song and passed it onto a nightclub owner, who then introduced it to Holiday. When she first heard the lyrics, she was deeply moved by them, not only because she was a Black American but also because the song reminded her of her father, who died at 39 from a fatal lung disorder, after being turned away from a hospital because he was a Black man, and because of the painful memories it conjured, she never enjoyed performing "Strange Fruit," but knew she had to, because even 20 years after her father’s death nothing had changed, the same thing that killed him were still happening in the South.  

The dark lyrics portrays Black victims as fruits that hang from a tree before rotting and decomposing; a similar narrative to the lynching and disposal of victims. The song was made with a lot of metaphors and hidden meanings so we are going to present you some of them:

In the first verse of the song the lyrics “Southern trees bear a strange fruit” and “Strange Fruit hanging from the poplar trees” insinuates that the “strange fruit” hangs from two different and very distinct trees: Southern trees and poplar trees. The poplar tree, also known as the tulip tree, is the state tree of Tennessee, which is also the state where the KKK originated. There are records proving that 251 lynchings occurred between 1882 to 1968 in Tennessee, with Black lynchings accounting for 204 of them.

In order to sustain themselves, trees require grounded roots that can absorb water to nourish its entire system.  So when she says “Blood on the leaves and blood at the root” she insinuates that the blood from the slain victims is what continues to give the tree of racism and supremacy its life, that the demoralization and pain that Black people suffer is what will, in turn, fuel the success and profits of white people.

“Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck”  crows they symbolize death, but it may also refer to the Jim Crow Laws.

“For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck” shows that no respect was given to the bodies, they were simply left to the elements, as if the human lives they once were had no value.

And to finish “For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop” brings the song back to the fruit metaphor, as trees similarly drop their fruit when they ripen the hanging bodies would rot on their rope until eventually the body would fall apart and drop to the grass below.

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