By Kurt Gottschalk

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

From Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol

Billie Holiday arguably invented the jazz song. She was among the first to put the vocals in front. Whereas earlier singers like Ivie Anderson would take a single chorus, usually after several solos from the band, Billie would start and end the song, with solos falling in the middle. She made it, quite literally, the singer not the song.

And if there is one song with which the singer is most identified, it is the haunting "Strange Fruit". Its stirring depiction of a lynching scene is a far cry from jazz songs like "A Tisket - A Tasket" or "I'm Checkin' Out, Goombye". Rarely have jazz songs created such controversial, or poetic, images.

The lyrics haunted Holiday too, although in a different way. As documented in David Margolick's book Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, published by Ecco Press last year, Holiday was initially resistant to record the song, although she would eventually perform it in every concert. She at times claimed to have written it or that it was written for her - two persistent myths debunked in Margolick's book and in the film Strange Fruit, which opens Nov. 6th at the Film Forum, and includes interviews with Abbey Lincoln, Amiri Baraka, Pete Seeger and Don Byron.

The lyrics and melody were written and published by Abel Meeropol, a Bronx schoolteacher and union activist, in 1938. Holiday and Meeropol, who published the work under the name Lewis Allan, met at the CafT Society, a Greenwich Village leftist nightclub, and it was there the Holiday first performed the song. Within a few years, she would end every performance with the song, under a single spotlight then fading to black. Margolick interviews band members who remember shows where Holiday, in a bad mood or angry with a hostile or flirtatious audience member, would walk on to stage and call the song. The band knew that they would only be playing one song, and that they were in for a rough night. While the song's history was muddied by Holiday's own tortured life, what it initially represented was what drove filmmaker Joel Katz to explore the topic for his documentary: a confrontation of continued racial hostility in this country, written not by a black but by a white man in the north, and a Jew at that. It was an acknowledgement, almost a confession. Meeropol reached across the racial and geographical barriers with his brief, 12-line verse, bypassed black/Jew and North/South divisions and said there are horrors in our land.

Katz learned about the song, and its remarkable author, from a letter in the New York Times. In response to a review of a 1995 biography of Holiday, Meeropol's adopted sons wrote to clarify the issue of authorship, and in the letter revealed that they were the biological children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two communist organizers executed by the US government in 1953 after being found guilty of espionage for giving secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. "Those three or four paragraphs read like a film script to me," Katz said. "It was a case of ‘truth is stranger than fiction’."

Katz, too, is from a New York Jewish home, and his father taught at Howard University in Washington DC, a historically black college. Meeropol's interest in the plight of blacks in the South resonated with his own experiences growing up, he said. It's Meeropol's story and the context of the time, more than Holiday's life, that Katz focuses on in his film (Margolick's book provides more of a picture of Holiday's relationship with the song).

"I didn't concentrate largely on her story because it's been told a lot, and it's been told on film a lot," he said. “I wanted to concentrate on those parts of the story that were fresh and idiosyncratic and weird." While the song is a picture from a different time, the lyrics still speak to racial tension more than 60 years later. Saxophonist Joe McPhee has recorded two songs which found their inspiration in Strange Fruit: the album Blood on the Root with his group Trio X, and Stranger in a Strange Land by Bluiett. To McPhee, the song's images are just as applicable today as they were early in the 20th century.

"The gravity of the piece, it draws you in, it forces you to look at reality," he said. "I think the same kinds of lynchings are still happening, they're just not hanging people from trees. It's emotional, it's psychological. I think it comes from a kind of emasculation. American males, especially black American males, for economic and social reasons, are limited. Even though the doors are open, they're only open a crack."

As Holiday neared the end of her life, her voice dropped, her range shrank, and her well of emotion deepened. The later versions of the song, like the Jazz at the Philharmonic version, recorded five years before her death in 1959, are nothing short of harrowing. "What she did was just so out there," McPhee said. "When you hear it early on [in her career], it just grabs you as a song, but when you hear it later in her life, my God. Her voice has changed so much, it just gets into your skin and under your skin and you have to confront what the lyrics are about. I mean, this is not MTV." !

Selected recordings There are a number of recordings of Holiday singing her signature song, available on a number of releases, perhaps most notably the Jazz at the Philharmonic version, available on the excellent collection Lady in Autumn: The Best of the Verve Years. Dozens of other artists have recorded the song as well, and folk singer Josh White's version should not be missed. Below is a selection of other recordings of Abel Meeropol's classic song.

• Tori Amos - Cornflake Girl (East West, 1994)
• Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy - The Fire This Time (In and Out, 1992)
• The Catherine Wheel - Chrome (Phonogram/Polygram 1993)
• The Gub Club - Early Warning (Sympathy for the Record Industry, 1997)
• Fred Ho and the Afro-Asian Ensemble - The Underground Railroad to My Heart (Soul Note, 1994)
• Ranee Lee - Deep Song (Justin Time Records, 1990)
• Abbey Lincoln - Abbey Sings Billie Vol. 1 (Enja, 1989)
• John Martyn - The Church with One Bell (Thirsty Ear Recordings, 1998)
• Carmen McRae - Carmen McRae Sings "Lover Man" and Other Billie Holiday Classics (Columbia/Legacy, 1997)
• Marcus Miller - Tales (PRA Records, 1995)
• Lou Rawls - Black and Blue (Capitol, 1963)
• Diana Ross - Diana Ross Live: Stolen Moments (Motown, 1993)
• John Sellers - Brother John Sellers Sings Big Boat Up the River and Other Blues and Folk Songs (Monitor, 1958)
• Archie Shepp - Something to Live For (Timeless Records, 1997)
• Nina Simone - Nina Simone Sings Billie Holiday (Stroud, 1972)
• Siouxsie and the Banshees - Through the Looking Glass (Geffen Records, 1987)
• Willie "The Lion" Smith - Lion and the Lamb (Topaz Jazz, 1996)
• Sounds of Blackness - Africa to America: The Journey of the Drum (Perspective Records/A&M 1994)
• Sting - Conspiracy of Hope: Honoring Amnesty International's 25th Anniversary (Mercury, 1986)
• UB40 - Signing Off (Virgin Records, 1980)
• Cassandra Wilson - New Moon Daughter (Blue Note/Capitol 1995)
• Robert Wyatt - Nothing Can Stop Us (Rough Trade, 1986)