Sixty-four years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday passed away at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. At 44 years old, she had arrived after being rejected by a nearby charity hospital due to evidence of drug use, and then spent hours on a stretcher in the hallway, unrecognized and unattended. Her financial estate was meager—70 cents in the bank and a roll of bills hidden on her person, her portion of payment for a tabloid interview she conducted on her deathbed. Today, Holiday is celebrated as one of the most influential musical artists of all time. Time magazine declared her 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit” the song of the 20th century. In 1999, Time noted, “In this sad, shadowy song about lynching in the South, history’s greatest jazz singer confronts history itself.” Abel Meeropol, a New York City teacher and songwriter who wrote under the name Lewis Allan, penned “Strange Fruit” after being horrified by a photograph of a lynching: “Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
Holiday’s performance of Meeropol’s song remains as powerful and striking today as when it was first recorded. “It hits, hard,” syndicated columnist Samuel Grafton observed shortly after the record’s release in 1939. “It is as if a game of let’s pretend had ended.” As a scholar of American religion, literature, and the arts, I explore how even secular works draw energy from religious narratives of justice, injustice, truth-telling, and redemption. I find “Strange Fruit” to be a resonant example of this. Like many composers whose songs Holiday recorded, such as George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern, Meeropol came from a family of Jewish immigrants to America fleeing antisemitic violence in Europe.
Two significant migrations shaped America in the early 1900s: the move from the rural South to the industrial North and from the Old World to the New. These migrations were partly driven by the desire to escape racial terror. These movements fostered some of the most enduring musical collaborations of the 20th century. Generally, the collaborations between Black and Jewish musical artists—like the Broadway productions of “Show Boat” and “Porgy and Bess” and Holiday’s performances with Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw—focused on the everyday joys and sorrows, often avoiding the harsh realities of prejudice. “Strange Fruit” was different. The song directly confronts the “strange fruit” of the title: hanged, burned, and mangled bodies left to decay on trees. Throughout the 20th century, white vigilante mobs murdered thousands of Black Americans with impunity, using lynching as a spectacle of terror. Meeropol first wrote down the song’s words and music on the back of a cabaret program dated Nov. 13, 1938—just four days after Kristallnacht, the night of violent anti-Jewish attacks throughout Nazi Germany that signaled a major shift toward the Holocaust. For Meeropol, a labor activist and secular Jew, Black and Jewish Americans shared the struggle for freedom from injustice. In another poem, he linked anti-Black violence with the persecution of Jews.
While Meeropol connected anti-Black and anti-Jewish prejudice, many Black Christians also related their suffering to that of the Hebrew slaves in the Bible and to Jesus’ own experiences. According to theologian James Cone, “Black ministers preached about Jesus’ death more than any other theme because they saw in Jesus’ suffering and persecution a parallel to their own encounters with slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree.” In the decade when Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit,” Harlem Renaissance writers W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes all centered works around the figure of the crucified Black Christ. Most African American Christians are Protestants, but Holiday was not. As a child, she was baptized Catholic at the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, a convent reform school in Baltimore where she was twice sent by the courts. She maintained an ambivalent relationship with Catholicism throughout her life. Protestant churches typically display the “empty” cross, symbolizing resurrection and new life, while Catholic settings often feature the “filled” cross, depicting Jesus’ body with arms outstretched, hands and feet nailed to the wood, to emphasize the agony of Jesus’ death and his solidarity with all who suffer.
The filled cross also conveys that the crucifixion of Christ—God in human form—is not a singular event. “When [Meeropol] showed me that poem,” Holiday said of “Strange Fruit,” “I dug it right off” because it “seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop.” Her father, jazz guitarist Clarence Holiday, died at 39 while on tour in Texas, and she believed he was denied life-saving care due to his race.
Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” echoes the filled cross in its depiction of lynching as a persistent reality. “It still depresses me every time I sing it,” Holiday admitted in her autobiography. “But I have to keep singing it … the things that killed him are still happening in the South.” Journalist Vernon Jarrett recalled seeing Holiday perform in 1947, noting she sang “this song as though this was for real, as though she had just witnessed a lynching.” He described the performance of “Strange Fruit” with a sense of resignation, as if she felt powerless to change the situation and could only express it through song.
Holiday’s approach to others in difficult situations was also reflective of her personal experience. Her Harlem apartment was a haven for those in need, where anyone with a hard-luck story could find shelter and food. Similar sentiments were echoed in a 1943 papal encyclical, which described the Church as a place of shared pain, comfort, and sustenance. Poet and jazz vocalist Babs Gonzales recalled that her apartment fed everyone in New York for four years.
Holiday consistently closed her sets with “Strange Fruit” from 1939 until the end of her life. By making it her signature song, she bore witness to racial violence and injustice, though she did not offer a remedy. Yet, her testimony held extraordinary power. Shortly after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, himself a Catholic with “misgivings,” included “Strange Fruit” as the first song on a playlist he made for America.