Song of the Day 10/29: Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”

The photograph that inspired the song Time magazine named the No. 1 song of the 20th century was taken on Aug. 7, 1930. The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, was photographed by local studio photographer Lawrence Beitler, who printed and sold thousands of copies over the next 10 days.

One of the people who saw it was Abel Meeropol, an English teacher at New York’s DeWitt Clinton High School (among his students was James Baldwin), who wrote a poem originally titled “Bitter Fruit” about it. The poem was published in the January 1937 issue of The New York Teacher, a union magazine. He later wrote the music.

It was first performed by singer Laura Duncan in 1938 at Madison Square Garden, and someone who heard it there (accounts differ on who is was) introduced it to Billie Holiday. She first performed it live in 1939 at the Café Society in Greenwich Village, New York’s first integrated nightclub. Manager Barney Josephson made sure it drew attention. He insisted Holiday close her show with it, and perform no encore afterward. The waiters would stop all service in advance, and the room was kept in darkness save for a spotlight on Holiday’s face.

Getting the song recorded proved problematic. Columbia, Holiday’s record company, wouldn’t touch it, fearing backlash from the South, and neither would her producer, John Hammond. Columbia gave Holiday a one-session release from her contract so she could record it for the Commodore label, owned by Holiday’s friend Milt Gabler. The record sold more than a million copies.

There are well over 100 covers of the song, but Holiday’s is the one that was added to the National Recording Registry 20 years ago.

Fun fact: Meeropol and his wife were communists and friends of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They adopted the Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert, after the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage.