Why is strange fruit important

It has inspired books, an opera and continues to be recorded today. This year India Arie included a version of the song on her album Songversation and Kanye West used a sample of Nina Simone's version of the song in his track Blood on the Leaves.

He left Mississippi after Emmett's death and now lives in Chicago, where he joined the church and devoted much of his life to working with deprived black youths. April Shipp is a quilt-maker from Detroit. She spent four years working on a large quilt called Strange Fruit. It bears the names of over 5, lynched men, women and children, each one lovingly sewn in gold thread on black fabric.

She even included two nooses. I stand for these people. After being told about Sylvia's uncle, April offered to look for his name on her quilt, finding him a couple of hours later under the Mississippi section. After receiving the pictures, Sylvia replied "Thank you, thank you.

There is something so comforting knowing he is remembered on a quilt, a bed-cover for the weary. Who was Emmett Till? Till's cousin remembers killing. FBI exhumes black lynching victim.

Radio 4 Soul Music: Strange Fruit. At witnessing Holiday's performance, audience members would applaud until their hands hurt, while those less sympathetic would bitterly walk out the door.

A known racist, Anslinger believed that drugs caused Black people to overstep their boundaries in American society and that Black jazz singers — who smoked marijuana — created the devil's music. When Anslinger forbid Holiday to perform "Strange Fruit," she refused, causing him to devise a plan to destroy her.

Knowing that Holiday was a drug user, he had some of his men frame her by selling her heroin. When she was caught using the drug, she was thrown into prison for the next year and a half. Her nightclub days, which she loved so much, were over. Still determined to soldier on, she performed to sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall, but still, the demons of her difficult childhood, which involved working at a brothel alongside her prostitute mother, haunted her and she began using heroin again.

In , Holiday checked herself into a New York City hospital. Suffering from heart and lung problems and cirrhosis of the liver due to decades of drug and alcohol abuse, the singer was an emaciated version of herself.

Her once heartfelt voice now withered and raspy. Still bent on ruining the singer, Anslinger had his men go to the hospital and handcuff her to her bed. When she toured the song, some proprietors tried discouraging her from singing it for fear of alienating or angering their patrons. Holiday combined rage and sadness in her rendition of the song Credit: Alamy. What is so remarkable about Strange Fruit is how indelible a mark it made on American society so soon after its release.

Even now, as I think of it, the short hair on the back of my neck tightens and I want to hit somebody. And I think I know who. Strange Fruit was not the first popular song to deal with race. But Strange Fruit stands out among protest songs for its graphic content and subsequent commercial success. This bold confrontation helped galvanise a movement that would eventually alter the course of US history.

At New York's Birdland, the promoter confiscated customers' cigarettes, lest their firefly glow distract from the spotlight's intensity. When some promoters ordered her not to sing it, Holiday added a clause to her contract guaranteeing her the option. Not that she always exercised that right. Yet Holiday could no more detach herself from it than if the lyrics had been tattooed on her skin. Strange Fruit would haunt Holiday for the rest of her life. Some fans, including her former producer John Hammond, blamed it for robbing her of her lightness.

Others pointed out that her burgeoning heroin habit did that job. So did the persistent racism which poisoned her life just as it poisoned the life of every black American. In , a naval officer called her a nigger and, her eyes hot with tears, she smashed a beer bottle against a table and lunged at him with the serrated glass.

A little while later, a friend spotted her wandering down 52nd Street and called out, "How are you doing, Lady Day? Holiday discovered heroin in the early 40s, an addiction that eventually earned her a year-long prison term in Ten days after her release, she performed a comeback show at New York's Carnegie Hall.

According to Lady Sings the Blues, she accidentally pierced her scalp with a hatpin and sang with blood trickling down her face. There could be only one contender for the closing number. During the 50s, she performed it less often and, when she did, it could be agonising to watch. Her relationship with it became almost masochistic. The worse her mood, the more likely she was to add it to the set, yet it pained her every time, especially when it prompted walkouts by racist audience members.

By the latter half of the decade, her body was wasted, her voice weathered down to a hoarse rasp, and Strange Fruit was the only song that seemed to dignify her suffering, wrapping her own decline in a wider American tragedy. Writing about her final years in his definitive book Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song, David Margolick says: "she had grown oddly, sadly suited to capture the full grotesqueness of the song.

Now, she not only sang of bulging eyes and twisted mouths. She embodied them. Strange Fruit: the first great protest song. Billie Holiday's song about racist lynchings stunned audiences and redefined popular music. In an extract from 33 Revolutions Per Minute, his history of protest songs, Dorian Lynskey explores the chilling power of Strange Fruit.