Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Billie Holiday (1915-1959) did not write “Strange Fruit.”

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

A former slave in America's post-Civil War South did not write it.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

“Strange Fruit” began as a poem… written in the 1930s by a Jewish

schoolteacher from the Bronx.

After viewing a photograph of a lynching, Abel Meeropol was moved to pen

the words Holiday would later make her own. Under the pseudonym “Lewis

Allan,” Meeropol set the poem to music and saw it first performed at a teachers' union meeting.
It just as easily could have vanished in obscurity after that… but fate intervened.

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

61

… YOU'RE NOT
SUPPOSED TO KNOW