Strange fruit Billie Holiday

SONG CRITIQUE: SIMPLE FRUIT BY BILLIE HOLIDAY
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Song Critique: Simple Fruit by Billie Holiday
The first impression that you get after listening to the song “Simple Fruit “by Billie Holiday is that the song is really about some unusual type of trees that are smudged with blood. As she sings, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the roots.” She sings with a compelling bone-deep sadness that makes one feel that there is something that is terribly wrong. To understand the song one will have to go back in 1939 when it was first done by Lady Day. During those days lynching was very commonplace in America, the southern states. In the last decade of the 19th Century, lynching of the black community in the south and even the border states became institutionalized as a method that the white people used to terrorize their black counterparts and maintain white supremacy (Tolnay, 1995) So she was singing about Lynching which resonated well with many in those days and it even became an anthem for the anti-lynching movement. The song is full of imagery that is well delivered by the lyrics, “Black body swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the popular tree.” Black men were usually the victims of the lynch mob in the south, so the black ma...