Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit | Black History 2024 Reaction | Day 1
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- Опубликовано: 19 окт 2024
- My first time hearing the song Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday. What a sad song. Bring tissues. I wasn't prepared for this. This is Day 1 of my Black History Month Music Reactions for 2024.
#billieholiday #blackhistory #musicvideoreaction
I am so glad you chose this song. More and more people need to hear it. And a lot more than once in their lives.
One of the world’s most powerful songs by the incomparable Billie. Someone guided your hand to make you choose this one first I think ❤️🩹
Thank you for reacting to this song. If it doesn't make you cry, you are not human. Billie Holiday was not a virtuoso singer, but she could radiate passion. making her one of the greatest singers ever.
Billie Holiday, ‘Strange Fruit’
One of pop’s first protest songs is also one of its most profoundly disturbing. Written by a Jewish schoolteacher in the Bronx, its lyrics evoke the horrors of a lynching (“Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”), and its languid melody conjures the unsettling quiet of a Southern backwoods night. The song was so controversial in the late Thirties that Holiday, a Columbia Records artist, had to find another label to release it (an indie owned by Billy Crystal’s uncle). “‘Strange Fruit’ is still relevant, because Black people are still being lynched,” Andra Day, who sang it in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, told Rolling Stone last year. “It’s not just a Southern breeze. We’re seeing that everywhere
It is such an appropriate song to start with you can’t ignore the history.
I'm surprised you haven't heard this classic. I'm an Aussie and I heard this as a nine year old and had flashbacks for years. The imagery is stark and a grim reminder of America's not so distant past. There is a documentary on the origins of the song which was shown on free to air television in Oz. Quoting Google: ""Strange Fruit" is a song written and composed by Abel Meeropol (under his pseudonym Lewis Allan) and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. The lyrics were drawn from a poem by Meeropol published in 1937. The song protests the lynching of Black Americans with lyrics that compare the victims to the fruit of trees."
I actually think I first heard this song by UB40. I like their version of it, but it certainly doesn’t hit in anywhere near the same way that lady days does. These issues were very much a part of her every day life as a black woman living in the 30s 40s 50s. Something British reggae band just can’t really reproduce.
Thank you for playing this. I doubt we could all cry enough tears to eternity.
This song is the most important song of the 20th century.
RIP Lady Day. You are loved and missed.
Of course, there were repercussions to this song. They tried to ban her from singing it etc.
The goverment tried to force Billie Holiday to stop performing this song, but she refused to relent - she kept performing it anyway. As a white guy, it makes me ashamed of the things that have happened in this country. The Native Americans suffered a very similar fate. It breaks my heart to listen to this song!
This song is a perfect depiction of what my people went through! Still going through it. It’s just with the guys in uniform! Sad!
Truth
Billie had so much power in her permanences. Too bad so few have been captured on film. Many of her recordings, especially those recorded live, are equally as impactful. I especially love some of her live performances for the 1940s when her voice had a different quality, although her ability communicator never diminished as the quality of her voice receded. This is a song she lived because racism and Jim Crow had a huge impact on her entire life. Contrast her career to that of white performers who borrowed heavily from her style: Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, etc. That must've been very painful to accept given that she was a true original and a musical genius. She is an artist who took what had come before in blues, jazz, and popular much and synthesised it into something entirely new. In her lifetime she never really got the credit she deserved for her contribution to the evolution of popular singing. Some of this was because she was black for sure. It must've hurt like hell because she knew how good she was and that is why she never gave up and never stopped singing.
Lady day was one of the best singers that there ever was. This is a difficult introduction to her work though. Although I will say that it is totally appropriate. I think for Black History Month. There are definitely easier ways to get into her music. It sounds like you’ve got all of your selections picked out already for the month but if not a couple that I would recommend Cab Calloway was a male jazz singer who I would also consider to be among the most talented ever. And my last selection would be a hard rock band from the late 80s early 90s called Living Color. They’re definitely worth a listen as well in particular their guitar player Vernon Reid is an absolute monster of a player.
One of those groups just may be on my list already....I'll give you one clue with this much, I bet you have a great PERSONALITY 😉 If you get it, just like it, but don't spoil it! And stick around!
This is not atrocities of the past...its still happening today!!!!
💯 🎯
Someone may have said so already - Abel Meeropol, a journalist and communist, wrote the poem that became the song. Epic.
As a Belgian I knew about this song for decades.
I don't know why but it still find it special that so many meaningful things are known outside the USA about the USA that are unknown in the USA.
Then again, I shouldn't be surprised anymore seeing that songs like 'We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee' was a hit in Europe while to this day in the USA it's hardly known.
FYI, keep in mind that lynchings aren't a thing of the past. They have happened not only during your parents life time but even during your life time the 'gallant' South still loves to take it out on the black community.
I have known about this song since I was a teenager in my native Denmark in the sixties.
Welcome to American history. This is precisely the kind of thing some people want to ban from schools. I think it should be taught. This was real.
and yet you laugh.... "for what it's worth...."
This song is about lynchings the strange fruit hanging from the trees were slaves
Not just slaves, but particularly after slavery, including Reconstruction under the Klan, and continuing in one form or another to this day. There were of courses other lynchings as well, such as of Italians and in the LGBTQ+ communities, but the term lynching is most often associated with attempts to keep African Americans from gaining their full human rights.
Almost correct. The song isn't about lynching slaves but just lynching in general. Lynching especially of black people was a common public affair in the 'gallant' south. And no, it didn't stop with the civil war. It didn't even stop in the 1900's and in fact it didn't stop in the 2000's.
Land of the free and home of the brave, unless you are not white.
It's not about slaves - it's about free black people being murdered by resentful, hateful white people. This song was written for her in 1939. At the time she sang this again in 1959, it was still happening, and still happens today, although seems to be bad cops doing the lynching. I'm from the south and I don't understand how anyone can be proud of that heritage. One of the more disgusting chapters of human history, and we're still awaiting the end of that awful chapter.
Make no mistake about it. The song was written as an ode to the so-called black American men and boys who were being lynched in the U.S. The term "strange fruit" as used in the lyrics has/had nothing to do with any feminist, lgbt/glbt, or people of color agendas. The term referred to socalled black American men and boys only. If you are going to discuss American history please be accurate and do not relegate the holocaust on black men and boys to "flat blackness" by saying "black people". They were so-called black American men and boys.