Introduction

Nina Simone and Billie Holiday were two early-middle twentieth century black singers that had a major influence on the civil rights movement, protest music, and music in general. Many blues and jazz singers of the civil rights period stated influence from these two artists, and their impact on their genre can still be felt today. Though Billie Holiday's destructive lifestyle let to her early death before the height of the movement proper, her voice is still remembered as one of the greatest in music. Her version of "Strange Fruit" is known for its haunting lyrics, and helped spread the message of injustice in the South, bringing about the end of the lynching era. The song "Strange Fruit" was originally a poem about lynching, inspired by a picture of black men after being hanged. The words were eventually sung as lyrics by artists like Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, and the song eventually became famous as the first modern protest song. Protest music itself has become a very widely employed musical genre, as songs can be a passionate medium for distributing a message. Protest music has evolved from its early beginnings in the thirties, with Nina Simone and Billie Holiday as two of the most prominent originators of the genre, to the medium that it is today, including artists like Bob Dylan and Rise Against.