Strange Fruit by the late great Billie Holiday from the first time she sang it in nineteen thirty-nine to now. The lyrics she sings carry a strong message and will pervade you after it is over. Many people believe that Billie Holiday singing this song caused the start of the civil rights movement even though it was recording sixteen years before the civil rights. Strange Fruit recorded Billie Holiday is a very haunting song that moves anyone who listens to it. The song was recorded after seventeen years after the first lynching. Strange Fruit shows the horror of lynching in the nineteen thirties through the bitter sweet lyrics she sings describing the corpses hanging from the trees.
Lynching took place in the south and was a way for white people to feel powerful. In Tulsa, Oklahoma a black man was falsely accused of raping a white woman in an elevator. Three hundred blacks were killed by white mobs in only just a few hours. “Lynching’s became even more widespread beginning in the 1880s and would remain common in the South until the 1930s” (“Lynching”). When African Americans were given their freedom, many white people felt like the freed African Americans were getting away with too much and that they needed to be controlled.
Billie Holidays lyrics in Strange Fruit cultivate the struggles African Americans had to go through during the 1930’s. As the song begins Holiday uses imagery to describe the malformed description of the bodies hanging from the trees. Holiday says, “blood on the leaves, and the root.” The blood talks about the blood that was there before the lynching took place. The blood is being portrayed as the roots. To me the roots could be portrayed as how they lived before slavery came along, they were free in Africa until they were captured and taken away from their home and to be taken to an unknown world and forced to work for someone.
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“Pastoral scene of the gallant south, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,” this verse to me is very disturbing because she describes their face after they are dead and what happened to them when they are being hung, their eyes are literally bulging out of their heads. The suffering in their eyes as their head hangs from the noose. The south was very tainted and gruesome for African Americans. Just walking outside, you feared for your life. Looking over your shoulder every move you made. “Set of magnolias sweet and fresh,” brings another pleasant feeling. Then the sudden smell of burning flesh,” the magnolias sweet would be the rotten smell of burning flesh to me.
The theme to me would be that racial profiling or prejudice is being portrayed because the people are African American. As the song goes on Holidays voice gets higher. “Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, rain to gather, wind to suck, sun to rot, tree to drop;” she is no longer talking about humans hanging from trees she refers to them as fruit. As the “fruit” the body rots the crows will start to pluck at them and as time goes by the bodies will begin to rot in the sun and it will begin to fall from the tree if it is there long enough. These lyrics to me make my stomach hurt because visually I can see the body beginning to rot and the crows plucking at their skin for food and it starting to smell then weeks later the body just falls out of the tree.
The message behind Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit was meant to analysis the lynching that took place between two African American men by a group of white people who did not get tried or convicted of their murder. The song was to promote against violence, but it was equally about racial profiling. The swinging bodies illustrate the person being killed and the references to blood and bulging eyes, twisted mouth, or burning flesh represented violence.
When Billie Holiday first sang Strange Fruit, no one knew what she meant by with the lyrics, but the first time she sang it the audience was silent. Billie Holidays song even today leave peoples faces blank after they hear it for the first time. Even when I heard it I could not stop hearing it in my head even after the song was over. It’s a very moving song that makes you think about the times that us as African Americans went though and are going through today. It is crazy how people are still lynching African Americans.
