What would the world be like without the internet?

First things first....click the song below and let it play while reading this. The guitar intro is pretty long...but bear with me. I'll talk about the song as I go and you'll probably be done reading before the first lyric.



I'm still on this huge Jeff Buckley trip. After my post about finding my way back to JB, where I posted the two videos, I went digging through my "Jeff Buckley Discography" folder on my desktop. I think it takes up something like 2 gigs of space. I heard this song "strange fruit" from the Sketches (For My Sweetheart the Drunk). It immediately caught my ear. I started working some of my voodoo computer magic (via Wikipedia) where I learned this song was JB's version of a poem written by Abel Meeropol and later performed as a song most famously by Billie Holiday.

Meeropol wrote "Strange Fruit" to express his horror at lynchings after seeing Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indian. He published the poem in 1936 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine.

Here are the 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.

Sure, it's depressing, but this poem/song will hold its place in time. I love learning that a song I like has serious substance and isn't just created to make a quick buck (thank you, Soulja Boy).