Word: fruitful
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last spring Billie Holiday went to the Manhattan studios of the Vocalion Company, which has her under exclusive contract, to make a batch of records. One number, which she had been singing at a new downtown hotspot called Café Society, she particularly wanted on wax. Called Strange Fruit, it had been written by a libertarian New York public school teacher named Lewis Allan and its lyric was a poetic description of a lynching's terrible finale. Billie liked its dirgelike blues melody, was not so much interested in the song's social content. But Vocalion...
Last week Manhattan's Commodore Music Shop-which not only makes and sells records but provides loafing room for most of the city's hot musicians-gave Billie and others a chance to hear her sing Strange Fruit, and also provided the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People a prime piece of musical propaganda. Unsqueamish, the Commodore had not balked at recording Teacher Allan's grim and gripping lyrics, which begin...
Southern trees bear a strange fruit...
...Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees...
...Ogden Reid of the New York Herald Tribune; Writers Stuart Chase, John Gunther and Louis Adamic, Editor Freda Kirchwey of the Nation; Federal Judge Thomas D. Thacher, one time President of the New York City Bar Association; Banker John Hertz Sr. of Lehman Bros.; President Samuel Zemurray of United Fruit ; President Floyd Bostwick Odium of Atlas Corp., monster investment trust in which Alex Gumberg was a sort of minister without portfolio...