Billie Holiday's song: Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

[edit]

I think the message that Billie holiday is trying to convey is how the Black people were treated in the south and shows how they got lynched by the whites just so that they were Black. Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees would have meant that the strange fruit were black dead bodies as the whites killed the blacks by hanging the bodies on trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant south is some what an irony as in the south, discrimination was extremely severe and the whole scene of the whites lynching blacks was totally not a gallant act. "Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh" is that Billie wants to show the audience how jarring it is as suddenly from fresh and pretty flowers come burnt corpses and Black negro's dying. I think all in all strange fruit/crop basically meant that it was the black people's bodies as crows eat dead bodies and not fruits so that "fruit" should be referring to the dead bodies of the Blacks who were lynched by the whites.