Recently, A&E aired Shining a Light: A Concert for Progress on Race in America. The televised concert featured Pharrell Williams, Big Sean, Sting, John Legend, and Bruce Springsteen, among others. In that special, Jill Scott performed a cover of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit." A standard of modern music, Jill Scott's... Read more

Billie Holiday's 1939 song "Strange Fruit" is the epitome of captivating. A poem penned two years prior by educator Abel Meeropol (as "Lewis Allan"), the song symbolizes and mourns the lynchings of Black people. In 1999, Time magazine would proclaim Holiday's version "the song of the century." Artistically, it is... Read more