Strange Fruit

There are protest songs, and then there is Strange Fruit. I heard it again today, and as always, it made me think.

Written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, the song began as a poem, Bitter Fruit, haunted into existence by a photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. Meeropol set his words to music, and in 1939, Billie Holiday gave it voice. Not just melody. Voice.

Holiday’s decision to perform Strange Fruit was bold, defiant, and dangerous. Singing about lynching in front of mixed audiences in segregated America wasn’t just controversial; it was incendiary. Columbia Records refused to record it, fearing backlash. So Holiday went to Commodore Records, a smaller independent label, and got it out into the world. And despite the threats, the warnings, the surveillance? She kept singing it. Often closing her sets with it in complete silence. No encore. Just a spotlight and the weight of history.

It wasn’t performance. It was ritual. Resistance. Witness.

The U.S. government didn’t just disapprove; they retaliated. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, under Harry Anslinger, targeted Holiday relentlessly, using her drug addiction as a weapon to silence her voice and suppress the song’s impact. They followed her, harassed her, and ultimately handcuffed her to a hospital bed as she lay dying. All because she refused to stop singing Strange Fruit.

And then Nina Simone picked up the torch.

Simone didn’t just sing the song. She inhabited it. Her classical training, her rage, her sorrow? They poured into every note. Her piano was sparse, deliberate, almost funereal. There’s no comfort in her version. No resolution. Just the weight of history pressing down. Simone didn’t ask for sympathy. She demanded attention. Her voice didn’t weep; it burned. She sang like she was staring down the very people who committed these acts and saying, “I dare you to look away.”

Holiday mourned. Simone raged. Both walked barefoot across sacred ground.

And then there’s UB40.

Their cover of Strange Fruit is, in my view, a travesty. Not because they’re white, but because they stripped the song of its gravity. They turned it into a reggae groove, and simply smoothed over the jagged edges of pain and protest. It felt like appropriation without understanding. Protest turned into background music. It wasn’t homage. It was erasure.

Strange Fruit is not just a song. It’s a wound. A requiem. A sacred cry. It demands reverence, not reinterpretation.

There are very few songs I believe should never be performed by white artists, but Strange Fruit is one of them. Not because white people can’t feel empathy or rage at injustice. They can, but this song is rooted in a specific, lived black experience. It’s not just about injustice. It is injustice. It’s not just about history. It is history. And when it’s sung without that weight, it risks becoming decoration instead of declaration.

This song is sacred ground. Billie Holiday walked it with sorrow. Nina Simone walked it with fire. Anyone else should think long and hard before stepping there.

Even white supremacists, I suspect, have to pause when they hear it. Not because they grow a conscience, but because the song is so raw, so undeniable, it cuts through even the thickest armor of hate. It’s like truth itself: ugly, unrelenting, and impossible to ignore.

Holiday whispered it like a prayer. Simone shouted it like a curse. And UB40? They turned it into a party track. It’s not just tone-deaf. It’s an insult.

I don’t play their version. I skip it. Every time. I have too much respect for the song and its history. Strange Fruit isn’t just music. It’s memory. It’s mourning. It’s confrontation. And it should never be touched lightly.

I’ll say this plainly: if Strange Fruit doesn’t touch you, if it doesn’t make you pause, ache, or feel something deep in your bones? I honestly have to question your humanity.