(October 23, 2024) “Strange Fruit” is Billie Holiday’s best-known song. She performed the song starting in 1939, two years after Abel Meeropol wrote the poem “Bitter Fruit.” Meeropol wrote the poem, which appeared in the New York Teacher magazine in 1937, after seeing a photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Ind.
“Strange Fruit” set the template for what a protest song should be when Lady Day began performing it in 1939, and the song has been remade many times, including by Andra Day for the soundtrack of the film The United States vs. Billie Holiday.
The song’s timelessness and continued relevance is a sad commentary and searing indictment on the racial disparities and injustices that exist in this country 85 years after Billie Holiday first sang “Strange Fruit” at the Café Society in 1939.
And that is what inspired William Bell to make his addition to the protest song canon, “Strange Fruit is Still Hanging.” Bell, of course, is no stranger to the movement. He was born in Memphis in 1939 and became one of Stax records biggest hit makers in the late 1960s, meaning he was there for the tragedies that befell Stax and Memphis in 1967 and 1968.
“Strange Fruit is Still Hanging” is a blues number that begins with Bell making a reference to George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police and comparing it to a lynching. He knows that justice is far for given even though the world witnesses these crimes. “Strange Fruit is Still Hanging” is both a plea for people to work for justice and the sad realization that the more things have changed, the more they remain the same. “People are still marching/People are still singing/But nothing has changed/Strange fruit is still hanging.”
Check out William Bell’s new protest anthem here.
By Howard Dukes
