Blood at the Root: Billie Holiday and “Strange Fruit” | Mickey Z.

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Photo credit: Mickey Z.

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

Feb. 7, 2014

“People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.”

- Billie Holiday

“Not many singers could claim to have ‘suffered for their art’ as Billie Holiday,” writes journalist Don Atapattu. “Born Elinore Harris … Billie certainly knew torment. As well as growing up black in the Jim Crow South; she endured sexual abuse; extreme poverty; homelessness; and (worked) as a prostitute before she began recording music at the age of 18.”

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Billie Holiday (1915-1959) did not write “Strange Fruit.”

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

A former slave in America’s post-Civil War South did not write it.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

“Strange Fruit” began as a poem… written in the 1930s by a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/blood-at-the-root-billie-holiday-and-strange-fruit-mickey-z

[erpowers]

1. Interesting

This an interesting history of the song Strange Fruit and Billie Holiday. It is sad that stuff like this no longer comes from the History Channel. This would have been a good story for the History Channel.