'Strange Fruit': The Timely Return of One of America's Most Powerful Protest Songs
Last year, North Carolina rapper Rapsody was searching for an introductory track for her new album, Eve, a concept LP about the history and power of black women. Her producer suggested a song she didn’t know well: Nina Simone’s 1965 version of “Strange Fruit.” A concise but graphic evocation of a Southern lynching, “Strange Fruit” was one of America’s earliest and most shocking protest songs, drawing attention to the thousands of acts of racist terrorism against black people in this country’s history. “Black bodies 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,” went one of its verses.
“As soon as I heard it, I knew that was the intro,” says Rapsody, who used the sample as the basis for her song “Nina.” “I’ve always been drawn to hearing about that part of our history, and I’ve been drawn to artists who speak to the reality of the times we live in. And even 80 years later, that song still speaks to the times. You don’t need more than 91 words. What else needs to be said?”
This year, with the return of Black Lives Matter protests to national headlines, a song written just over 80 years ago has taken on startling new relevance. In the first six months of this year, Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit” — the first and most famous version of the song — was streamed more than 2 million times, according to Alpha Data, the data-analytics provider that powers the Rolling Stone Charts. On his SiriusXM show last month, Bruce Springsteen included “Strange Fruit” on his playlist of protest songs, and in an interview called it “just an epic piece of music that was so far ahead of its time. It still strikes a deep, deep, deep nerve in the conversation of today.”
Veteran R&B singer Bettye LaVette moved up the release of her new cover of “Strange Fruit” after the police killing of George Floyd. “I watch the news all day long, and the language started to change from ‘unarmed black man’ to ‘lynching,'” she told RS last month. “So I called the [record] company and told them that it seemed like we keep telling this story over and over and over.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/strange-fruit-history-legacy-1030942/
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