![]() ![]() To this day you can find online references to “Strange Fruit” that attribute its words to Abel Meeropol and music to Billie Holiday. Later, Billie Holiday claimed in her ghostwritten autobiography that she set Abel’s poem to music. In 1940, Abel was called before New York State’s Rapp-Coudert Committee, a legislative commission attempting to root out communist teachers, and asked if the Communist Party ordered him to write the song. “Strange Fruit” was the composition my father was most proud of, but one that he never lived with easily. ![]() Billie Holiday did not perform it until 1939. ![]() My adoptive father, Abel Meeropol, wrote the words and music to Billie Holiday’s signature song, “Strange Fruit.” Abel, a high school English teacher with a passion for writing, reacted to a gruesome photograph of a lynching in late 1936, with a poem entitled “Bitter Fruit.” In 1937 or 1938 he set the poem to music and changed the title. ![]()
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