EXCLUSIVE FILM LAUNCH: "Strange Fruit" Billie Holiday Documentary & Q&A

Sunday 1st May 12 noon at The Jazz Centre UK. Entrance £5.

Strange Fruit: The Documentary

Glyn Robbins, the ‘ambassador’ in the UK for the film will introduce the screening, followed by a Q&A session.

In their 31 December issue 1999 Time magazine named Strange Fruit as “Best Song of the Century”. In 2002, it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".

It is often mistakenly believed the song was written by its greatest interpreter Billie Holiday. It actually started out as a poem written by a Jewish teacher, and member of the Communist Party of the USA, Abel Meeropol, who later set it to music using the pseudonym Lewis Allen. The inspiration for writing the poem was a notorious photograph of a lynching. Strange Fruit subsequently became a central part of the musical accompaniment to the Civil Rights movement in the USA.

In 2002 independent filmmaker Joel Katz made a documentary exploring the history and legacy of this classic song. It outlines the dramatic background to the poem and song’s composition and its enduring legacy as one of the most influential protest songs of all time. This is a unique opportunity to see this award-winning film, which touches on the great stories of twentieth-century America: race and religion, McCarthyism, jazz, and New York from Greenwich Village to Harlem.