“Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday

"Strange Fruit" is the song Billie Holiday first cut in 1939, and it still lands like a blow. Abel Meeropol, writing as Lewis Allan, turned a 1937 poem of his into a protest against the lynching of African Americans, its central image likening the dead to fruit hanging from trees.

Meeropol had performed it around New York City venues with his wife Anne Shaffer and singer Laura Duncan, but Holiday made it unforgettable, delivering horror with no melodrama at all. Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records called it the beginning of the civil rights movement. Her recording entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978, and in 2002 the Library of Congress picked it for the National Recording Registry.

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