Before Billie Holiday would perform “Strange Fruit” at New York’s integrated Café Society all the cluttering buzz of the nightclub would come to a complete halt, the waiters asking for silence before a lone, smoke-caressed spotlight would illuminate the face of the jazz ingénue then known largely for hits like “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” with Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra from 1935 and  “I’m Gonna Lock My Heart,” a breezy heartsick number from 1938. But now the audience was about to hear something dramatically different, a grisly, heartbreakingly poetic, unsentimental indictment of lynching in the South.

“Strange Fruit” is a musical curio in many ways. With its drifting flecks of melancholy jazz, campfire folk, its abrupt ending and dramatic hint of showtunes, it sounds like little else. . The song’s slow swing rhythm echoes a slow, comfortable Southern evening. The lyrics are specifically brutal as they use the beauty of the South against itself to denounce lynching—specifically its breezes, scents and rich sense of gallantry. The breezes only nudge the hanging bodies, the “scent of magnolia” is sweet only until it is harshly replaced by the “smell of burning flesh,” and the gallantry is undermined throughout. Nature is also co-opted as the wind, sun, rain, and trees are all turned un0naturally evil as a metaphor for the unnatural nature of racism. It ends abruptly on a thudding chord and Holiday’s rising and falling extension of the final word: “Here is a strange and bitter crop.”

The audience sat rapt while the brutal song enveloped them in a collective fog of grief, and as the final, abrupt chord hung in the air the spotlight would vanish, leaving the house in darkness for a brief moment before the lights went up, and they would see that Holiday had vanished. “It was a beautifully rendered thing, like a great, dramatic moment in the theater,” cartoonist Al Hirschfield recalled.

Drummer Max Roach called Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit,” “more than revolutionary,” legendary producer Ahmet Ertegun called it “a declaration of war” and “the beginning of the civil rights movement,” and Time Magazine named it the song of the century in December 1999, saying, “In this sad, shadowy song about lynching in the South, history's greatest jazz singer comes to terms with history itself.”

But the song had inconspicuous beginnings. It began life as a poem written by New York City Jewish-American high school teacher Abel Meeropol (under the pen name Lewis Allan) and first published as “Bitter Fruit” in the January 1937 edition of teacher’s union magazine, The New York Teacher. Meeropol—well known in intellectual circles for his agitprop songs—soon after set his poem to music and began performing it around New York City. Others picked up on its undeniable power and began performing it as well, including black vocalist Laura Duncan, who eventually performed it at Madison Square Garden. Whether Café Society founder Barney Josephson initially brought Meeropol and his song to Holiday (then only 23 years old), or whether Meeropol just showed up with a desire for Holiday to perform “Strange Fruit” is a matter of some debate, but Meeropol eventually appeared at the nightclub and ran through his new song for Holiday. Josephson and producer Bob Gordon were bowled over by the power of the lyrics, but Meeropol recalled an incommunicative Holiday who asked only the meaning of the word, “pastoral” during their meeting. (Holiday, who had a notorious flair for the apocryphal and would later claim that the song was written specifically for her or that she was responsible for co-authoring it—she also recalled a long silence following her first public performance of the song, whereas Meeropol remembered “thunderous applause.”) Josephson gave the song to arranger Danny Mendelshon, who shaped Meeropol’s original music to an unknown degree, though some—including regular Holiday songwriter Arthur Herzog—maintain his influence was as important to the song as Meeropol’s and Holiday’s.

Soon after her first performance of the song at Café Society, New York Post writer Samuel Grafton wrote excitedly that it was “a fantastically perfect work of art” and that “[i]f the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its Marseillaise,” but black sentiment regarding the song was split from the beginning, with college students and older progressive African American’s like Paul Robeson believing that it portrayed black as victims, while many black intellectuals regarded it as sacred, “like sitting in church,” said Pittsburgh Courier journalist Frank Bolden, “it was like a hymn to us.”

Regardless of how listeners interpreted the song, when Holiday performed it the world stopped spinning, necessitating its placement at the end of every performance—when Holiday called for it the night was over. She practiced the song at small private parties and get-togethers before debuting it at Café Society—America’s first racially integrated nightclub and one of the only places in the country it could have found a foothold with regular performances. Meeropol recalled that when she finally did it “was incomparable and fulfilled the bitterness and shocking quality I had hoped the song would have.”

Columbia Records refused to record the song, a decision that surprised and deeply upset Holiday, but she moved forward to record the song for Commodore Records, and “Strange Fruit” debuted on the Billboard charts at #16 on July 22, 1939. It’s B-side, “Fine and Mellow” was a blues about domestic violence that, despite Holiday’s belief that the A-side was the sales winner, turned out to be the larger hit for Commodore. But at a time when singers would often sing and record material that others had made famous, “Strange Fruit” was one of the first popular songs to be associated with one specific artist and one specific recording. Though some artists, particularly singer Josh White, performed the song, most renditions of the song didn’t appear until after the Civil Rights movement wound down in the 1970s. 

The original Commodore single is the definitive take with its lonely trumpet solo and sympathetic piano runs, but it moves more quickly than subsequent recordings and live performances would capture. Holiday’s measured and elegant performance allows the song to avoid the melodramatic traps of many protest songs. The studio recording from June 7, 1956 is worth note as it features a blaring trumpet solo from Charlie Shavers, a visceral punch in the gut that opens the song and counters Holiday’s more restrained performance and the song’s dark poetry, but this version also contains too many clever elements that distract from the simple power of the song, including an all-too-playful piano accompaniment by Wynton Kelly, and capped by a dramatic single percussive exclamation point. There are also a handful of live recordings of varying degrees of quality in existence. In some Holiday does little more than mumble her way through the song, while others are fantastic, such as the Jazz at the Philharmonic recording captured at the Embassy Theatre in Los Angeles on April 22, 1946, which is often included on Verve collections of her work.

David Margolick, in his book-length study of the song, said that it, “marked a watershed, praised by some, lamented by others, in Holiday’s evolution from exuberant jazz singer to chanteause of lovelorn pain and loneliness.” Margolick continues to say that once Holiday added it as a regular piece of her set, “some of its sadness seemed to cling to her,” which is precisely why legendary critic and producer John Hammond (the man credited with “discovering” Holiday when she was just 17 years old) believed that the song was “artistically… the worst thing that happened to her” as after its success she turned more and more to the dirge-like songs of heart-break and loneliness that defined her final years. 

In the 1960’s the song fell out of favor as the idealism that buoyed the civil rights era clashed with a song Margolick termed “too depressing or too bitter or too redolent of black victimhood,” but the unique strength and quality of the song returned it to prominence soon after and its since been recorded by a wide range of artists including, Cocteau Twins, Robert Wyatt, Tori Amos, Sting, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Cassandra Wilson, John Martyn, Jimmy Scott, Abbey Lincoln, Lou Rawls, Jeff Buckley, Siouxie and the Banshees, The Gun Club, UB40, and the Twilight Singers—101 Strings even cut an instrumental version. Nina Simone is the only artist of note to make the song a part of her regular repertoire for a short time before dropping it saying it was “too hard to do.”

Diana Ross cut an unconvincing version of the song for her role as Holiday in the 1972 film, Lady Sings the Blues, and Eartha Kitt, while portraying Holiday in a one-woman show during the 1980s, hesitantly sang it, saying later, “I could hardly get through it.” It uncomfortably exists as a small handful of downtempo and dance remixes, and it incomprehensibly gets a spin on the turntable as a weapon of seduction in the 1986 hit Nine 1/2 Weeks—throwing jazz and blues critic Albert Murray’s suggestion that “you don’t get next to someone playing ‘Strange Fruit’ ” out the window.

In 1994 Judge Stephen Reinhardt used the song as part of an argument to the United States 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that death by hanging—which is still legal in New Hampshire, at the behest of corrections officials, and Washington, where a defendant sentenced to a death penalty may still choose hanging—should be considered cruel and unusual punishment: “To many Americans, judicial hangings call forth the brutal images of Southern justice immortalized in a song hauntingly sung by Billie Holiday.” The full text of the song appeared in the footnotes to his opinion. The court disagreed with his opinion 6-5.