It’s not surprising that Bechet’s version followed that of Holliday’s pretty quickly. Both were issued in 1939 with the vocal rendition receiving a great deal more attention than Bechet’s instrumental lament.

The time that these two earlier versions of the song were recorded, the States were enmeshed in an economic climate that decimated the vast majority of its citizenry. There were roaming hordes of farmers from the Midwest without a destination or a plan during the Great Depression. The lower classes were ostensibly relegated to living day to day on scraps of food while the rich, who were affected to a certain degree, remained relatively unmoved.

During this time, racism maintained a central role in American life. Founded after the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan found a new popularity. The radical group saw its numbers grow in response to a financial crisis that people blamed on each other as opposed to bankers and various other business people who had actually caused the problem in the first place.

With a renewed vigor, Jim Crowe Laws became the bane of every black resident of the South. Racism had obviously persisted up until the Great Depression, but much like in Nazi Germany, a minority group was singled out and exploited as the cause of the problems that the nation was facing. The versions of “Strange Fruit” recorded during this particular era should rightly have been perceived as protest. The song may have served as an awakening to some, but more importantly it seems that “Strange Fruit” represented a vociferous attempt by black folks to speak up after hundreds of years of oppression.

In stark contrast to the earliest renditions of the song, “Strange Fruit,” as recorded by Jeffery Lee Pierce and the Gun Club, serves to comment upon the performer’s own place in ‘80s culture.

Recorded after the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, Pierce’s “Strange Fruit” wasn’t entirely motivated by the growing distance between the lower classes and rich folks who ran the country. Although, class and economic issues may have played a part in the decision to cover Meeropol’s song, the early ‘80s found the States engulfed in more than one concurrent drug epidemic. Crack sprang up in urban areas and heroin, a ‘70s left over, remained a troublesome reminder that while social class played a role in dictating one’s life in the United States, drug users were afforded virtually no deference.

The Reagan era of America’s history is going to be recalled for its far ranging economic implications as well as its innumerable international missteps. But the eight years of Reagan’s presidency served to create new divides in society. With the religious voting block behind him, Reagan embarked on an odyssey that would seek to further disenfranchise anyone that didn’t jive with his own perspective on what America should look and feel like.

The times that the various recordings of “Strange Fruit” were set to tape are separated by four decades and change. Minorities hadn’t made the gains that the ‘60s had promised. But alongside the racially discriminated during the ‘80s was a self made outsider that had no taste for normalcy even as disdain for the broader culture would end in tragedy too often for comfort.