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Related: About this forumThis is what real lynching looks like Mr. President and it has nothing to do with your impeachment.
Strange Fruit may have been written by American song-writer and poet Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allen), but ever since Billie Holiday sang the three brief stanzas to music in 1937, shes owned it.
Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan, said she always thought of her father when she sang Strange Fruit. He died at age thirty-nine after being denied medical treatment at a Texas whites only hospital. Because of that memory, Holiday was reluctant to perform the song, but did so anyway to tell people about the reality of life as a black man in America.
It reminds me of how Pop died, she wrote in her autobiography. But I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it, but because twenty years after Pop died, the things that killed him are still happening in the South.
The song was so poignant for Holiday that she laid down some rules when she sang it at her gigs: She would close the evening with the song; the waiters would stop service when she began; and the room would be in total darkness except for a spotlight on her face. There would be no encore.
Pachamama
(16,887 posts)A video with that song and showing Lynchings is perhaps more appropriate to the title of your OP...
But I appreciate your story explaining how Billie Holiday came about to sing these song and became known for it...
icymist
(15,888 posts)But, I see it didn't make it there anyway so it doesn't matter. Besides, I think the article describes it well.
virgogal
(10,178 posts)LenaBaby61
(6,976 posts)Both knew ex-slaves when they were teens.
My late Dad would be 100 if alive, and my late mom would be 94, and the things that the ex-slaves shared with them about their daily lives & existence as slaves hurt my late parents to their souls until they passed away. Both had tears in their eyes as we spoke about these incidents throughout the years. And like I say, what the ex-slaves told them they shared with me, and what they told me STILL, STILL, STILL make me sob, cry, weep and shakes me to my very soul to this day. I'll never forget some of the things that they shared with me. Things so horrific, that I'm sick to my stomach thinking about it right now.
What a human being did to another human being, children included--because of the color of their skin, and because they could get away with doing those things.