After my first listen to Kanye West’s new YEEZUS record the standout track by far for me was “Blood On The Leaves”. One of the three samples featured is Nina Simone’s achingly dark cover version of “Strange Fruit”.
Interestingly, “Strange Fruit” originated as a poem written by a Jewish American teacher from New York, Abel Meeropol. In 1937 Meeropol saw a photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. Meeropol later recalled how the photograph “haunted me for days” and inspired the writing of the poem, “Strange Fruit”. The poem was published in the New York Teacher and later, the Marxist journal, New Masses.
After seeing Billie Holiday perform at the club, Café Society, in New York City, Meeropol showed her the poem. Holiday liked it and after working on it with Sonny White turned the poem into the song, Strange Fruit. She first sang “Strange Fruit” at Café Society and closed her set with this song, leaving the stage without taking any encores, so the audience would be left to think about the meaning of the song.
The controversy surrounding the song meant music publishers didn’t want to touch it and radio stations refused to play it. The record finally made it to No. 16 on the charts in July 1939. However, the song was denounced by TIME Magazine as “a prime piece of musical propaganda” for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). Then 60 years later, in 1999, TIME named it the song of the century.
“Strange Fruit” examines the history of lynching, and the interplay of race, labour, the Left and popular culture that would give rise to the Civil Rights movement.
This is a poem, turned into and popularised into a deeply moving and haunting Jazz song by Billie Holiday, then masterfully covered by Nina Simone, then sampled by Kanye.
Other killer samples featured on the track are:
TNGHT – R U Ready
C Murder – Down For My Niggaz.
To get your civil rights nerd on even further and you’ve got a spare hour to kill be sure to check out this PBS doco on Strange Fruit’s origins and influence.
-Leanne C
