"Strange Fruit" is a song written and composed by Abel Meeropol (under his pseudonym Lewis Allan) and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.

[3][4] Meeropol set his lyrics to music with his wife Anne Shaffer and the singer Laura Duncan and performed it as a protest song in New York City venues in the late 1930s, including Madison Square Garden.

[6] In 2002, "Strange Fruit" was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".

[14]: 36-37 One version of events claims that Barney Josephson, the founder of Café Society in Greenwich Village, New York's first integrated nightclub, heard the song and introduced it to Billie Holiday.

Other reports say that Robert Gordon, who was directing Holiday's show at Café Society, heard the song at Madison Square Garden and introduced it to her.

[14]: 61-62  When Holiday's producer John Hammond also refused to record it, she turned to her friend Milt Gabler, owner of the Commodore label.

[19] In her 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday suggested that she, together with Meeropol, her accompanist Sonny White, and arranger Danny Mendelsohn, set the poem to music.

The writers David Margolick and Hilton Als dismissed that claim in their work Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, writing that hers was "an account that may set a record for most misinformation per column inch".

[27] LA Times noted that Siouxsie and the Banshees's version from the 1987 album Through the Looking Glass contained "a solemn string section behind the vocals" and "a bridge of New Orleans funeral-march jazz" which enhanced the singer's "evocative interpretation".