Surely no song in American history has ever been guaranteed to silence an audience or to generate such discomfort." It's too artsy to be folk music, too explicitly political and polemical to be jazz. For Margolick, "'Strange Fruit' defies easy musical categorization and has slipped between the cracks of academic study. Now, for the first time, New York Times and Vanity Fair contributor David Margolick uncovers the extraordinary history of this important American composition that few singers dare to perform to this day. Our image of Billie Holiday is that of the elegant and melancholy jazz singer known for her haunting voice and immortal classics like "Lady Sings the Blues" and "My Man." But there was another song she performed that stood out in her repertoire: "Strange Fruit," a disturbing and impressionistic elegy to lynched black men in the South.
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