Strange Fruit Lyrical (and Non-Lyrical) Logos

Strange Fruit Lyrical (and Non-Lyrical) Logos

Billie Holiday’s soulful ballad “Strange Fruit” invokes a chilling sense of sorrow.  The bluesy melody, the trumpet’s acoustic solos, and the adagio tempo help to better convey the serious undertones of Holiday’s piece.  “Strange Fruit’s” musicality helps listeners connect to its grim subject matter.

Holiday starts her piece lyrically by invoking imagery of black fruit that hangs from trees that bear “blood on the leaves and blood at the root.” These lyrics call to mind the Southern lynching of blacks.  Holiday uses the word “strange” to signal to listeners that there is something wrong and possibly unnatural with the subject matter of her piece.  She explains that the fruit, which represents southern blacks, is vulnerable to crows, rain, and wind.  The fruit’s vulnerability, she explains, produces a “strange and bitter crop.”  The crop is representative of the American South as a whole.  Through her use of analogy, Holiday suggests that Southern blacks’ vulnerability to white oppression creates bitter tension between the two groups.  Her analogy expresses that black lynching hurts not only black Americans, but also the South at a whole.

 Similarly, Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” uses analogy to convey why the state of lynching had gone too far and how stronger laws were needed to protect blacks.  Both works use observations of injustice to define why the state of the South was unstable at the time.

~Tylar