Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit

"Strange Fruit" began as a poem about the lynching of a black man written by a radical Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx Abel Meeropol, who used the pen name Lewis Allan (the names of his two children, who died in infancy). "Strange Fruit" was written as a poem expressing his horror at the lynchings,and was first published in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine. Though Meeropol/Allan often asked others (notably Earl Robinson) to set his poems to music he set Strange Fruit to music himself and the song gained a certain success as a protest song in and around New York. Before Holiday was introduced to the song, it had been performed by Meeropol, by his wife, and by a black vocalist called Laura Duncan, who performed it at Madison Square Garden.