Strange Fruit symbolizes a hauntingly poignant homage to African Americans who were victims of hanging in the South at the same time as it represents a scathing indictment of the practice, in an ironic, defiant, and bitter treatment both lyrically and vocally. Goethe once stated that “Music is the shorthand of the emotions”, meaning music often evokes emotional responses in us that penetrate that walls we normally erect to maintain our emotional composure. Such walls are falsely constructed if against nature, and Strange Fruit uses the thwarting of nature to indict the southern practice of lynching as a transgression against nature. Therefore, lynching comes off as something that indicts those who committed the practice much more than those subjected to it.
Aretha Franklin once maintained that to tell if a song were any good, one should make a list of three adjectives to describe the lyrics and a list of three adjectives to describe the music. The closer the two lists of words are, the better the song. In Strange Fruit the lyrics of Lewis Allan (vocals by Billie Holiday) overlap with the melody in a manner that evokes a similar list of adjectives to describe each: haunted, indignant, and connected. The lyrics and music are haunting of the crimes committed against nature by the lynching of African Americans, they are indignant that such a crime should be committed in a pastoral and allegedly gallant setting, and they are angry to the point of bitterness that any humane species could cultivate such a strange fruit.
If we analyze the perspectives on society, life, and the human condition echoed in the song, we see that the metaphor of nature is likened to the human condition. To be with nature is to be natural; to be against nature is unnatural. In other words, there are higher practices and laws than manmade laws, and to go against them is to be of dubious moral character for one is fighting h
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