From book review of Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society and an Early Cry for Civil Rights by Vic Schermer (Click here).

This is a book about a song. The song is "Strange Fruit," with a haunting melody and an earth shattering lyric about the abhorrent and horribly common Southern lynchings of African Americans which stand as an ugly symbol of race hatred however and wherever it may occur. The song, utterly powerful and totally different from jazz as a form of "entertainment," became one of the "signature" tunes of Billie Holiday, so much so that many, including the present writer, mistakenly believed that she wrote it, a belief she herself engendered. She first sung "Strange Fruit" in 1939 at The Cafe Society, a trendy yet iconoclastic Greenwich Village club frequented by left-wingers and entertainers and which was one of the first nightclubs to welcome African Americans. Indeed, blacks were treated with special favor and respect at the club, which was owned by a white "left-winger" named Barney Josephson. The club became one of Billie's regular venues from the late thirties through the 1950s.

The song's actual composer was Abel Meeropol (pen name, Lewis Allan), a Bronx school teacher who also wrote the patriotic and anti-discriminatory song "The House I Live In," made famous by Frank Sinatra. Meeropol was a political radical and prolific writer, who also adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg when they were electrocuted in the 1950's for alleged spy activities for the Soviet Union. Thus, the story of "Strange Fruit" brings together the life of the greatest jazz songstress of all time with the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement, the history of left wing politics of the 1930's through the 1950's, the story of a landmark New York nightclub, and the mores of an exceptional era in the world of entertainment.

~Masato