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By: Paul S Cilwa |
Posted: 10/1/2026 |
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Page Views: 162 |
| Hashtags: #Music |
| The companion to 1944, one year earlier—back when nobody yet knew how it ended. |
One number here has no words, and that is the whole of the point.
"Strange Fruit"—words and music both—was written by Abel Meeropol, a
schoolteacher in the Bronx who published it under the pen name Lewis Allan after
he saw a photograph of a lynching and could not stop seeing it. Billie Holiday
has been closing her shows with it since 1939, in a room that goes dark and does
not applaud. It is not mine and I make no claim on it.
What I could not do was put that lyric in front of a hall of soldiers in 1943.
Columbia would not even press the record for fear of its Southern accounts; a
white bandleader singing those words to an audience in a segregated army would
have emptied the room before the second verse, and emptied it of exactly the men
the song was written for. So we play the tune. Only the tune, scored for dancing,
and nobody on the floor is told what it is.
I know what that costs. Everything that makes the song matter lives in the words,
and I have taken the words out. The hope—and it may well be a coward's
hope—is that a man dances to it, likes it too well to let it go, asks the
bandleader what the thing is called, and goes and finds the Holiday record for
himself. Then it arrives without his permission. A tune can get past a man's
guard in a way an argument never will, and if one of them goes home awakened
despite himself, that is worth more than anything I could have said into a
microphone.
As with 1944, the rest of the lyrics are mine and the arrangements follow my
melodies, with Suno doing the work of a band I do
not have.
You can listen to the whole album here, or visit each track listed below to read the lyrics and play that song only.
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