The song begins like a nature poem. Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Then the fruit comes into focus. There is blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies are swinging in the southern breeze, hanging from the poplar trees.
The second verse keeps the pastoral language and lets it curdle. The South is gallant and the magnolias smell sweet, until the smell of burning flesh cuts through. The last verse hands the bodies over to nature. Crows pluck at them. Rain and sun do the rest, until the tree lets them drop. It ends on two words: a strange and bitter crop.
There is no chorus and no comfort in it. The song does one thing. It puts a lynching in front of the listener and refuses to let him look away.
The song makes injustice visible. It holds up the thing a whole region preferred to call scenery, and makes the listener see it as murder.
The Song and the Singer
Billie Holiday did not write it. Abel Meeropol did, a Jewish schoolteacher and Communist from the Bronx (Biography). He wrote the poem after seeing a photograph of the 1930 lynching of two Black teenagers, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, in Marion, Indiana (Britannica). It ran in The New York Teacher, the teachers' union magazine, in January 1937 under his pen name, Lewis Allan, and under a different title: "Bitter Fruit" (Wikipedia). The change matters. Bitter names a taste. Strange makes you look at the thing before you understand what it is. He set it to music himself, and his wife sang it at small gatherings. Asked years later why he wrote it, he began simply: "because I hate lynching" (Songfacts). In 1953 the same man adopted the two orphaned sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Barney Josephson ran Café Society in Greenwich Village, the first integrated nightclub in New York. He asked Meeropol to play the song for Holiday, who was singing there. She was 23. She built a ritual around it. The song was always last. Waiters stopped serving and the room went dark, except for one light on her face. She gave no encore (History Hit).
Her label, Columbia, would not record it, fearing what Southern stores and radio stations would do. She cut it for the small Commodore label on April 20, 1939 (Britannica). It eventually sold a million copies (Wikipedia).
The song followed her. Club owners told her to drop it. The head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, sent word that she should stop singing it. She went onstage that night and sang it (NPR). His agents pursued her for the rest of her life. She was arrested on drug charges in 1947 and went to prison. She died in 1959, at 44, in a hospital bed under police guard.
Lament and Indictment
Holiday's 1939 record is beautiful, and the beauty is part of the horror. The band plays for more than a minute before she sings a word (Wikipedia). When she comes in, she is slow and controlled. She mourns. The loveliness of the sound makes the words harder to bear.
Nina Simone recorded it in 1965, at the height of the civil rights movement, with little more than her own piano. Simone grew up under Jim Crow in North Carolina, and she sang it as an accusation. Her biographer Nadine Cohodas hears it as an indictment rather than a lament. A French critic wrote that Simone "attacked" the song (Goodreads). She called it the ugliest song she had ever heard, ugly because it tore at what had been done to her people (uDiscover Music).
Holiday's recording is the more beautiful. Simone's is the harder to listen to. Holiday weeps over the dead. Simone turns and faces the people who killed them.
Scripture needs both voices, and it has both. Jeremiah is the weeper. "Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" (Jeremiah 9:1). That is Holiday's voice.
Isaiah is the accuser. He told a nation full of worshippers that God would not listen to them. "And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood" (Isaiah 1:15). That is Simone's voice. Many in the crowds under those trees would have been in church that Sunday.
Not Remain All Night upon the Tree
The song's first image is blood at the root. Scripture's first murder ends the same way. Cain killed his brother in a field and tried to walk away from it. God said, "What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground" (Genesis 4:10). The ground does not keep quiet about what is spilled on it.
קוֹל דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ צֹעֲקִים אֵלַי מִן־הָאֲדָמָה
Kol demei achicha tzo'akim elai min ha'adamah.
The Hebrew says bloods, in the plural. The rabbis of the Mishnah noticed. One reading is that Abel's blood cried out along with the blood of every descendant he would never have. Another is that his blood was scattered on the trees and on the stones (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5). The first murdered man in Scripture was named Abel. So was the man who wrote this song.
The Torah anticipated the hanging tree. Even for a man lawfully tried and condemned, it set a limit. "And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; (for he that is hanged is accursed of God;) that thy land be not defiled" (Deuteronomy 21:22–23). A lynching broke that law twice over. There was no trial. And the display was the point. The body was left on the tree so that others would see it. Meeropol's last verse, with its crows and its rot, describes exactly what the Torah forbade. It also names the result. The land is defiled.
Scripture has one more scene under a hanging tree, and it belongs beside this song. Seven of Saul's descendants were hanged in a political killing and left exposed on a hill. Two of them were the sons of Rizpah, and she refused to leave them. She "took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night" (2 Samuel 21:10).
She sat there for months, driving off the crows. When David heard what she had done, he gathered the bones and gave them a burial. Only then does the text say, "after that God was intreated for the land" (2 Samuel 21:14). The land was not healed until someone refused to look away from the dead.
That is what Holiday did, every night, last, in a dark room. She would not let the crows have them.
Hanged on a Tree
The apostles had a way of describing the crucifixion that sounds strange to modern ears. In their early preaching they often skipped the word cross. They said a tree. Peter told the council in Jerusalem, "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree" (Acts 5:30). He said it again in the house of a Roman officer: "whom they slew and hanged on a tree: Him God raised up the third day" (Acts 10:39–40).
The word choice was deliberate. It reached back to Deuteronomy and its curse on the one hanged on a tree. Rome crucified people in public, beside the roads, so that everyone passing would see and be afraid. It was the same logic as the lynching photograph. The theologian James Cone built a whole book on that likeness, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. A Jewish poet in the Bronx wrote the song. Long before Marion, Indiana, a Jew was hanged on a tree outside Jerusalem for the whole city to look at.
Peter saw something in that tree that no lynch mob intended. "Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed" (1 Peter 2:24). The one hanged there carried the guilt of the crowd that hanged him.
Meeropol's song ends on a strange and bitter crop. Scripture ends with a different tree. John saw it beside the river in the city of God, bearing fruit every month, "and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" (Revelation 22:2). The song puts blood on the leaves. The last page of the Bible promises leaves that heal what the blood has done.