hello, GUEST,albert.

See this excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Fruit

"Strange Fruit" began as a poem about the lynching of two black men written by a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx Abel Meeropol, who used the pen name Lewis Allan (the names of his two children, who died in infancy). Meeropol and his wife were also the adoptive parents of the children of the executed spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in the 1950s. "Strange Fruit" was written as a poem expressing his horror at the lynchings, and was first published in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine. Though Meeropol/Allan often asked others (notably Earl Robinson) to set his poems to music he set Strange Fruit to music himself and the song gained a certain success as a protest song in and around New York. Before Holiday was introduced to the song, it had been performed by Meeropol, by his wife, and by black vocalist Laura Duncan, who performed it at Madison Square Garden.

Meeropol said later that he had been inspired by seeing Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. "Strange Fruit" was eventually heard by Barney Josephson the founder of Cafe Society, New York's first integrated nightclub, who introduced it to Billie Holiday. Holiday performed the song at Cafe Society in 1939, a move that by her own admission left her fearful of retaliation. Holiday later said that the imagery in "Strange Fruit" reminded her of her father's death, and that this played a role in her persistence in performing it. The song became a regular part of Holiday's live performances.

Holiday approached her recording label, Columbia, about recording the song, but her producer John Hammond—the man credited with originally discovering her—did not support her choice, and Columbia refused to record the song. Holiday arranged to record it with Commodore, Milt Gabler's alternative jazz label in 1939. She would record two major sessions at Commodore, one in 1939 and one in 1944. "Strange Fruit" was highly regarded and in time became Holiday's biggest selling record. Though it became a staple of her live performances at the time, Holiday's accompanist, Bobby Tucker, later commented that Holiday would break down after every performance of it.

In her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday suggests that she, together with Lewis Allan, her accompanist Sonny White and arranger Danny Mendelsohn put the poem to music, though the claim is dismissed by David Margolick and Hilton Als in 'Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song as "an account that may set a record for most misinformation per column inch". When challenged, Holiday - whose autobiography had been ghost-written by William Dufty - claimed "I ain't never read that book."
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The club owner immediately recognized the impact of the song on his audience and insisted that Holiday close all her shows with it. Just as the song was about to begin, waiters would stop serving, the lights in club would be turned off, and a single pin spotlight would illuminate Holiday on stage. During the musical introduction, Holiday would stand with her eyes closed, as if she were evoking a prayer.

The song was ultimately to become the anthem of the anti-lynching movement. The dark imagery of the lyrics struck a chord, and can be said to have planted one of the first seeds of what would later become the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s.

The song became an instant success and came to be the piece most identified with Holiday, though it has been performed by countless others including Josh White, Sting, Robert Wyatt, UB40, Tori Amos, Pete Seeger, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Cassandra Wilson, Nina Simone (on Pastel Blues), Lester Bowie, Antony and the Johnsons, Jeff Buckley, Cocteau Twins, Sounds of Blackness, This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, John Martyn, The Twilight Singers, Karate, and Tcheky Karyo (in Ce lien qui nous unit) and remixed by Tricky. In October 1939, Samuel Grafton of The New York Post described Strange Fruit: "If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its Marseillaise."

In 2002, it was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry"...