Billie holiday strange fruit release date

1939 song made famous by Billie Holiday

For other uses, see Strange Fruit (disambiguation).

"Strange Fruit" is a song written and composed by Abel Meeropol (under his pseudonym Lewis Allan) and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. The lyrics were drawn from a poem by Meeropol published in 1937.

The song protests the lynching of Black Americans with lyrics that compare the victims to the fruit of trees. Such lynchings had reached a peak in the Southern United States at the turn of the 20th century and the great majority of victims were black.^[2]: 561 The song was described as "a declaration of war" and "the beginning of the civil rights movement" by Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun.^[3][4]

Meeropol set his lyrics to music with his wife Anne Shaffer and the singer Laura Duncan and performed it as a protest song in New York City venues in the late 1930s, including Madison Square Garden.

Holiday's version was