Strange Fruit

Made famous by singer Billie Holiday in an unforgettable 1939 recording, the haunting anti-lynching anthem "Strange Fruit" was not, as many believe, written by an African-American. Rather, it grew out of poem penned by a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, Abel Meeropol. Outraged by the shabby and ...more

If half the battle of making a good documentary is in the subject matter, Strange Fruit is halfway home before it rolls a second of footage. The song "Strange Fruit," made famous by Billie Holiday in the 1950s, was written by Bronx high school teacher Abel Meeropol in 1937 as a poem about the lynching of a black man in the South. Since then it has been recorded by dozens of artists as diverse as Sting, Pete Seeger, Siouxsie & the Banshees, and Cassandra Wilson, and it is that very appeal and ...more