Elizabeth Blair profiles the man who wrote the famous song about lynching:
It's been recorded dozens of times. Herbie Hancock and Marcus Miller did an instrumental version, with Miller evoking the poem on his mournful bass clarinet. Miller says he was surprised to learn the song was written by a white Jewish guy from the Bronx. "Strange Fruit," he says, took extraordinary courage both for [composer Abel] Meeropol to write and for [Billie] Holiday to sing. "The '60s hadn't happened yet," he says. "Things like that weren't talked about. They certainly weren't sung about."
How Meeropol's story intertwines with McCarthyism and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (the Meeropols adopted their two sons) is equally fascinating.
The Dish 