The singer Billie Holiday was 24 years old when she first performed "Strange Fruit," a song about lynching in the American South.
It was 1939; Billie Holiday was working in the ultra-fashionable crossover night spot for blacks and whites in Greenwich Village, called Caf?ociety. She had instructions to sing the song, walk off stage and refuse, no matter what, to return for a bow.
This was a time when Ella Fitzgerald's "A Tisket a Tasket" was the norm for Black singers. Yet here in a prophetic wail was an historic call to consciousness, about a "pastoral scene of the gallant South, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth..." of a "black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees."
It became Billie Holiday's signature song and, more than that, a song that foretold the civil rights movement and changed the world. Everyone's sung it by now, none more hauntingly than Billy Holiday. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
