Strange Fruit
Jack Daws
Seattle, Washington
Strange Fruit, 2007
Tire, rope
This work references the song of the same title, first performed by Billie Holiday. While many people assume that the song “Strange Fruit” was written by Billie Holiday, it began as a poem by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher and union activist from the Bronx who later set it to music. Disturbed by a photograph of a lynching, the teacher wrote the stark verse and brooding melody under the pseudonym Lewis Allan in the late 193Os. Meeropol and his wife are also notable because they adopted Robert and Michael Rosenberg, the orphaned children of the executed communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
“Strange Fruit” lyrics
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies 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 magnolias, 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 trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
Bio
Jack Daws was born in 1970 in Kentucky and now works in Seattle, Washington.