While the blood from the lynched victims flows and inevitably stains the leaves and tree roots below, this powerful line serves to address the sheer institutions that fed the racist motives at hand.

In order to sustain themselves, trees require grounded roots that can absorb water to nourish its entire system. Holiday insinuates that the blood from the slain victims is what continues to give the tree of racism and supremacy its life.

Additionally, the blood represents the institutionalized ideologies that have reigned true in the minds of white supremacists since the beginning of slavery; that the demoralization and pain that Black people suffer is what will, in turn, fuel the success and profits of white people.

This lyric is referring to how the people would look after being lynched and hanged. Like the line after it, it contrasts the “pastoral scene of the gallant south” with the bodies hanging from trees with their eyes bulging out of their head and their twisted mouth.

The hanging bodies would rot on their rope from the sun until eventually the body would fall apart and drop to the grass below.

This brings the song back to the fruit metaphor, as trees similarly drop their fruit when they ripen

In the American South, the magnolia symbolizes purity and nobility. They are also carried by brides in their bouquets, signifying good wishes. The magnolia is the state flower of Mississippi and Louisiana.

This line refers to the hanging bodies of African-Americans in the trees of many southern areas during the mid 30s in America. The bodies would swing in the summer breeze.

‘Black bodies’ is a strong and definite interpretation of the African-Americans giving a harsh view of the danger of discrimination. Also, Billie tried to pull the picture of the motionless/powerless bodies which the bodies will swing through the breeze.

Crows eat fruit but they will seek out flesh; that is carrion. Therefore they symbolize death.

Crow may also refer to the Jim Crow laws, racist segregationist laws enforced against the African-American population.

The bodies of lynched black people were often left hanging to terrorize and breed fear in black communities.

No respect was given to the bodies; they were simply left to the elements, as if the human lives they once were had no value.

The sudden transition from the sweet, serene magnolias to the wretched stench of dying humans is a stain upon the moral standing of the southern United States.

Pastoral themes are those that relate to the countryside, and are usually idealized. Pastoral songs and poems date back centuries, but there is also a specifically US Southern tradition of the pastoral that “Strange Fruit” brings to mind and critiques. The entire song seems to be describing a typical, calm pastoral scene – but listeners quickly realize it is something far more sinister.

“The gallant south” also paints a picture of the imagined regal-like Antebellum South, where plantation owners ruled as a sort of aristocracy, and society was thought to be based on chivalric ideas. In reality, however, this “Gallant South” was built off on the exploitation of enslaved black persons. After the Civil War this system and society based on exploitation nominally ended – but the lynchings described in this song sought to recreate it again. By juxtaposing this romanticized South and the reality, the song heightens the twisted and demented situation that African Americans found themselves in the 20th century.

Following the piano introduction to set the ominous mood of the track, Holiday sets the scene of the harrowing song, comparing the fruit that would normally hang from the branches of trees to the Black bodies that hang from trees as a result of lynching.

Holiday insinuates that the “strange fruit” hangs from two different and very distinct trees: Southern trees and poplar trees.

Historically, the Southern half of the United States has represented the land of the white race, where slavery was an intrinsic part of economic profits and white supremacy was deemed a norm, putting Black citizens in a position of inferiority. These ideologies especially progressed and strengthened through the late 19th century and into early 20th century. According to the NAACP, approximately 4,700 lynchings occurred in the South during this time frame, mainly done out of spite so as for white people to perpetuate a narrative that their race was still the all powerful.

Holiday also alludes to “strange fruit” hanging from poplar trees. The poplar tree, also known as Liriodendron tulipifera or the tulip tree, is the state tree of Tennessee, which is also the state where the Ku Klux Klan originated. The Tuskegee Institute records that 251 lynchings occurred between 1882 to 1968 in Tennessee, with Black lynchings accounting for 204 of them.

A wide variety of fruits and crops were profitably harvested, but this depended on the slave system. So it was with the rotting bodies of lynched men and women, mainly black but including other ethnic groups. (Chinese for example). So they are the strange fruit, the “bitter crop”, that creates “profit” for white supremacists.