Songs 10 and 11

Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday

Strange Fruit was written sometime in the 1930's by a New York school teacher name Abel Meeropol. The song talks about lynching in the south. It particularly talks about the lynching of "black bodies" which would be African Americans. The song doesn't give a descriptive definition of a lynching itself but more of seeing a hanging body in a tree. This song was originally a poem that was later put to music. The song sounds almost like a documentation. The way it is song makes it sound like someone from a different area came to the south and say a body in a tree and wrote about it in a journal. Although this song is kind of creepy when you think exactly about what topic is being sung about, I liked the song. It has a mysterious and eerie sound to it that I thought Billie Holiday's voice fit perfectly. If anybody has heard the song "I'll Be Seeing You" and heard Billie Holiday's rendition of it her voice sounds so unique that it changes the mood of a song (at least for me). Although I had learned about lynching last year, the way this song portrayed lynching was a different point of view for me. The last stanza of the song where the writer says "Here is fruit for the crows to pluck" made me think of how inhumane lynching seems to have been. Whether those people deserved to die or not it seems really inhumane to have been killed in such a way.

A Change Is Gonna Come by Seal

A Change Is Gonna Come was written in 1964. The song talks about how a change will come concerning racism. The song is told by a man who has had a hard time throughout his life because of racism, but believes that one day it will change. So, the songs is written such that you would believe that the person who had written it had gone through these experiences himself. I liked this song a lot. I thought that the instruments in the background were done really nicely, and that it had a great flow to it. It wasn't until I looked up the lyrics and thought about it that I really understood what kind of a "change" the writer was looking for, but after I figured out that it made more sense. I think the writer was brave for having written this song, because I'm sure there have been many people who have felt racial oppression but haven't been bold enough to say or write anything about it. So, that this man was brave enough to have written his feelings down and had his song recorded seems like quite an accomplishment to me. This song doesn't talk about any particular event in America other than that there was racial oppression at the time but what was written in the view of someone undergoing racial oppression which gave me a new perspective on what people must have gone through and how hard it had to have been for them.