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Is Strange Fruit by Nina Simone or Billie Holiday?
“Strange Fruit” is a song written and composed by Abel Meeropol and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. The lyrics were drawn from a poem by Meeropol published in 1937.
Who sang Strange Fruit first Billie Holiday or Nina Simone?
Billie Holiday recorded her iconic version of Strange Fruit on 20 April 1939. Eighty years on – in the first of our Songs that Made History series – Aida Amoako explores how a poem about lynching became a timeless call to action.
Who originally wrote Strange Fruit?
Abel Meeropol
Strange Fruit/Composers
Who came first Nina Simone or Billie Holiday?
Early in her career, Simone would identify Holiday as her musical kin and predecessor, as familiar and family, a musical intertexuality that can be traced back to Simone’s 1958 cover of George Gershwin’s “I Love You, Porgy” (which he had titled, “I Loves You…”), on Little Girl Blue and ostensibly culminated in Simone’s …
Why did Billie Holiday record Strangefruit?
Meeropol was very disturbed by the persistence of systemic racism in America and was motivated to write the poem “Bitter Fruit” after seeing a photo depicting the lynching of two Black teens in Indiana in 1930.
Why does Nina Simone hate Billie Holiday?
However, by the time Simone published her memoir in 1991, almost thirty years after Pastel Blues, she had completely excised Holiday from her song list (with the exception of “Porgy”) and fully resisted comparisons to Holiday. She writes, “They only compared me to her because we were both black.
Was Nina Simone a good pianist?
Performance style. Simone’s bearing and stage presence earned her the title “the High Priestess of Soul”. She was a pianist, singer and performer, “separately, and simultaneously.” As a composer and arranger, Simone moved from gospel to blues, jazz, and folk, and to numbers with European classical styling.