Possibly one of the most poignant songs about the disgusting aberration called racism is the song made famous by Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit.
I have put a video of her singing it here, so watch and listen, and then I shall talk about it all a bit more.
This song – though to call it simply a song seems to be remarkably weak – was written by a New York Jew curiously enough, as a protest to the lynchings that were all too common in the southern states of the USA earlier in the 20th Century.
Abel Meeropol, who wrote this remarkable song as a poem in 1937, wrote it as a result of seeing the famous photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana in the early 30’s, and then put his poem to music at the request of a number of his friends, and his wife gave it its first public performance in New York.
OZTHOUGHTS 