Billie Holiday

Southern trees bear a strange fruit / 
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / 
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / 
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees / 

Released in 1939, Billie Holiday’s iconic song, titled “Strange Fruit,” gets to the core of why the jazz singer remains ever relevant in American history. 

At a time when obsequiousness was expected of women, and especially Black women, Holiday adapted the anti-lynching poem by the writer Abel Meeropol into a painful and moving exploration of the fear Black Americans felt in the nascence of the civil rights movement.

Columbia Records feared the song would stoke racial tensions, so Holliday left for an independent label, where she had more creative freedom.

Arrested in 1947 for possession of narcotics, Holiday spent a year in a minimum security prison. Two weeks after her release, she sold out Carnegie Hall. Her arrest barred her from performing in venues where alcohol was served, though she defied the ban to play packed clubs and cabarets.

Holiday died in 1959, aged just 44.

— Lillian Bautista and Zack Budryk