CATALIJNE covers ✧ Strange Fruit

”Strange Fruit ✧ Such a beautiful, grasping, suffocating, honest, heartfelt song and story to pass along. Abel Meeropol’s poem and Billie Holiday’s performance kept history alive with this piece of art.
For those who don’t know this song and the story behind it, please, please read below. It’s not an easy listening song. It’s a heartfelt story.
For me personally? It’s their story, but even so, a general story about power, inequality and injustice which we still face today. Why? Why not live together, as equals, as friends, in harmony…
I just can’t get my mind around that.
Do you?”

✧ about STRANGE FRUIT

“Strange Fruit” was originated as a poem written by Jewish-American writer, teacher and songwriter Abel Meeropol, under his pseudonym Lewis Allan, as a protest against lynchings. In the poem, Meeropol expressed his horror at lynchings, inspired by Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. He published the poem under the title “Bitter Fruit” in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine of the Teachers Union. Though Meeropol had asked others (notably Earl Robinson) to set his poems to music, he set “Strange Fruit” to music himself. His protest song gained a certain success in and around New York. Meeropol, his wife, and black vocalist Laura Duncan performed it at Madison Square Garden.- Wikipedia