Strange Fruit

Abel Meeropol, a teacher who published as Lewis Allan, wrote the poem, which appeared in January 1937 in The New York Teacher under the title "Bitter Fruit". He set it to music himself. He was inspired by a photograph of the 1930 lynching of two men in Marion, Indiana. Holiday first performed it at Cafe Society in 1939. She said that singing it made her afraid of retaliation, and she kept it because its imagery reminded her of her father. Barney Josephson set rules for the performance: she closed the set with it, the waiters stopped service, the room went dark except for a spotlight on her face, and there was no encore.

Columbia feared the reaction of retailers in the South and of its radio affiliates, and John Hammond also refused to record it, so she turned to Milt Gabler. Columbia released her from her contract for one session. Frankie Newton's eight-piece Cafe Society band played an arrangement by Newton, and Gabler asked the pianist Sonny White to improvise an introduction, so that she starts singing after 70 seconds. It was recorded on 20 April 1939. The Library of Congress essay says it became the best selling record of her career, reaching number 16 on the charts, and the Library added it to the National Recording Registry. Samuel Grafton of the New York Post wrote in October 1939 that if the anger of the exploited rose high enough in the South, it now had its "Marseillaise".

She kept the song in her repertoire for twenty years and recorded it again for Verve. The Grammy Hall of Fame inducted her version in 1978.