Yestersday's Guardian newspaper carried a most interesting article about the BillieHolliday song "Strange Fruit".
The song was written by a New York teacher and communist Abel Meeropolin the 1930s and was first published in a trade union magazine called the New York Teacher. He published it under the pseudonym "Lewis Allan " because he was concerned about anti semitism.
Abel wrote the song after seeing a photograph of two black teenagers hanging from a tree in Marion,Indiana.

Thousands of black people had been lynched in the late 18th and up to 1940s and the song brought this home to many white people the as they listened to the song which Billie Holliday made her "own".

The article which explored the dark history of the song was written by the black British playwrite Caryl Phillips.

Who else has recorded it?
Albert