’s 1939 protest song about lynching (written by Abel Meeropol) — the blues tradition’s language of witness made explicit.
Abel Meeropol, a Bronx schoolteacher writing as Lewis Allan, first published the lyric as a poem in 1937, then set it to music. Holiday began singing it in 1939 at Café Society, New York’s first integrated nightclub; she closed the set with it, lights down, no encore. Columbia would not record it — southern retailers and the CBS radio network were the stated fear — so she cut it on April 20, 1939, for Milt Gabler’s small Commodore label, with the Café Society band. It became the best-selling record of her career, and the blues tradition’s language of witness made explicit.