‘STRANGE FRUIT’ BY BILLIE HOLIDAY | Legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday adapted “Strange Fruit” from a poem written by Jewish-American teacher Abel Meeropol. The song was a soulful indictment of the ...

In March 1939, a then-23-year-old Billie Holiday closed out her set at New York's Cafe Society with a song she hadn't performed before: "Strange Fruit." Written by Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol, ...

Black America has a long and winding history of using songs for defiance and consolation. Testimonies from slave ship sailors recall how kidnapped Africans during the Atlantic slave trade sang to send ...

Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. The 44-year-old singer arrived after being turned away from a nearby charity hospital on evidence of ...

Music legend Billie Holiday is regarded as one of the most soulful American singers of the ‘50s. But her most powerful song, “Strange Fruit,” put Holiday on the federal government’s hit list, and ...

The inspiration for "Strange Fruit" reportedly came to Jewish poet Abel Meeropol in 1937, after he saw a photograph of two Black men lynched before a grinning white crowd. The song still resonates ...