Billie Holiday

Seems there might be a different type of lynching happening with the "Imus Controversy", one that means to aim more at or kill the spirit. It hurts today too.

On a late-winter night early in 1939, Billie Holiday stood on stage at New York's Cafe Society and, with a single pin light illuminating her face, sang a new song called Strange Fruit:

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood on the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar tees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnlas, sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop

Compliments of the Phat Library