Billie Holiday, Downbeat club, New York, c. February 1947.

From John Szwed's "Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth":

Billie Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit” was released in 1939, the same year that Gone with the Wind was breaking box office records and Marian Anderson was barred from singing in Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs

It was not the first song about lynching. Some earlier pieces, such as Bessie Smith’s “Haunted House Blues” and Lead Belly’s “Hangman’s Blues” and “The Gallis Pole,” had veiled allusions to lynching, but the first published song was “Sistren an’ Brethren,” an African American folk song collected by Lawrence Gellert, published in the New Masses in January 1931, and reprinted in various places thereafter. The next published, and more widely known, piece was Irving Berlin’s “Supper Time,” sung by Ethel Waters in the 1933 stage production of As Thousands Cheer. In the scene in which the song is featured, a mother sits in her kitchen thinking about how she should tell her children that their father is dead. A large newspaper headline about lynching is spread across the back wall of the stage. It was a shocking song to see in the context of a Manhattan revue, but those who heard it only as a song apart from its theatrical setting might have understood it as just another “my man done gone” bluesy tune.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHL70ESeCiI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye2N_2ce3QE

Abel Meeropol, a New York City high school teacher who wrote under the name Lewis Allan, published a poem titled “Bitter Fruit” in the union magazine New York Teacher in January 1937. For years there had been efforts to make lynching a federal crime, but Congress and the president had refused to act on the matter. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to support the only bill that stood a chance of passing.) Meeropol wanted to do something to raise public awareness of these acts of violence, and in late 1938 he set the poem to music. After his wife and others sang it publicly, the New Theatre League published it under the title “Strange Fruit” in 1939.

The poem:

Read “Strange Fruit” by Abel Meeropol on Genius

Billie certainly understood it on the night in 1958 that she sang it for Maya Angelou and her little son, and then explained its lyrics graphically to the child, upsetting the boy and Angelou. In Lady Sings the Blues Billie wrote that when she was first shown the song, she “dug it right off. It seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop,” drawing attention to the death of her father, Clarence Holiday, whom she believed had died when he returned from World War I and was refused treatment at a white veterans hospital in Dallas. She undoubtedly also knew the widely told account of Bessie Smith, who was believed at the time to have died under similar circumstances. Billie’s only concern about the song, she said, was that audiences might hate it.

Some clubs she later performed in asked her not to sing it. At times she chose to withhold it from the audience. “It has a way of separating the straight people from the squares and the cripples,” she remarked. There were songs before and after this one that protested many things, but if they lacked memorable or singable melodies they were quickly forgotten. The melody of “Strange Fruit” is not especially distinguished, but the shock of its words and its imagery make up for any deficiencies in the tune. The song even drew the attention of the FBI, who wanted to know if the Communist Party had prompted Lewis Allan to write it.

Time, racist bitches:

Though few reviews of the record were openly hostile, some were perverse. An article titled “Strange Song” in Time led with: “Billie Holiday is a roly-poly young colored woman with a hump in her voice. . . . She does not care enough about her figure to watch her diet, but she loves to sing.” The song, Time said, “provided the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People a prime piece of musical propaganda,” and “Billie liked its dirge-like blues melody, was not so much interested in the song’s social content.” The African American press was far more sympathetic to the song’s content, but a headline from the Atlanta Daily World could still read like something from Variety: “Billie Holiday Records First Song About Lynching Evils: Buxom Singer Chirps It Nightly at Café Society.”