<p>Recorded by jazz legend Billie Holiday in 1939, "Strange Fruit" is considered to be the first significant song of the civil rights movement and the first direct musical assault upon racial lynchings in the South. Originally sung in New York's Cafe Society, these revolutionary lyrics take on a life of their own in this revealing account of the song and the struggle it personified. Strange Fruit not only chronicles the civil rights movement from the '30s on, it examines the lives of the beleaguered Billie Holiday and Abel Meeropol, the white Jewish schoolteacher and communist sympathizer who wrote the song that would have an impact on generations of fans, black and white, unknown and famous, including performers Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, and Sting.</p>

Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday and the Biography of a Song

David Margolick

Hilton, Als

Humor & Entertainment

Ecco

American author John Horne Burns (1916—1953) led a brief and controversial life, and as a writer, transformed many of his darkest experiences into literature. Burns was born in Massachusetts, graduated from Andover and Harvard, and went on to teach English at the Loomis School, a boarding school for boys in Windsor, Connecticut. During World War II he was stationed in Africa and Italy and worked mainly in military intelligence. His first novel, The Gallery (1947), based on his wartime experiences, was critically acclaimed and one of the first to unflinchingly depict gay life in the military. The Gallery sold half a million copies upon publication, but never again would Burns receive that kind of critical or popular attention. Dreadful follows Burns from his education at the best schools to his final years of drinking and depression in Italy. With intelligence and insight, David Margolick examines Burns' moral ambivalence toward the behavior of American soldiers stationed with him in Naples, and the scandal surrounding his second novel, Lucifer with a Book, an unflattering portrayal of his experiences at Loomis.

Dreadful

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

This text explores the story of a song that foretold a movement, and the lady who dared to sing it. In 1939, the performance of the song's evocative lyrics portraying the lynching of a black man in the Southern US sparked controversy, and sometimes violence, wherever Billie Holiday went. It was 25 years before Dr Martin Luther King Jr, led his famous march on Washington, yet "Strange Fruit" lived on. In this text Margolick chronicles its effect on those who experienced it first-hand: musicians, artists, journalists, intellectuals, students and even the waitresses and bartenders who worked in the clubs.

Strange Fruit

Canongate Books Ltd.

Strange Fruit (Em Portugues do Brasil)

Cosac Naify

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Books by David Margolick