There's several versions, which one is good?
Hello and good morning to you, Rexp. I took some time this morning to dig down and really find out the answer to your inquiry here. We had actually already had this conversation back on July 11th of this year.
https://www.whatsbestforum.com/thre...tinue-to-blow-away-digital.38800/post-1063343
I went to you tube to find out any information I could from the version that sounds the closest I could find to what I hear via Qobuz (video below). The comments were closed and the caption at the bottom of the video yielded no usable information other than, when I hit "more", it showed the lyrics and at the very bottom, they noted that it was from the album "Pastel Blues".
So, I clicked on that to see if they could offer me any kind of information on the version or other information at all. That video confirms (at least on the video itself) that it was from the album "Pastel Blues". Strangely enough though, the video also shows "Strange Fruit" on the record label itself. (See the screenshot below)....
but after further research, this means nothing.
That video link actually has comments opened up, and it seems as if I wasn't the only one who discovered this song while watching Cold Case . But the comments yielded no further information to help me find out the answer to your query.
I was able to find what I believe to be a legit Nina Simone Facebook page (
rumor has it, a family member is running the page )
https://www.facebook.com/nina.simone - There are some videos there that I will most definitely watch, along with some other historical tidbits.
So, I check out Discogs -
https://www.discogs.com/search?limit=250&q=Nina+Simone+strange+fruit&type=all&page=1 and I see that there are 483 hits that could lead one down a very deep rabbit hole. I searched for a while and gave up, as there was simply way too much information and in checking random albums on that listing, some of them were not even sang by her.
I kept researching and pretty much this is my conclusion. She apparently only did two "official" recordings of this song. One was offered on the Pastel Blues album and the other was recorded at Jazz à Juan in Antibes, France, on July 24th, 1965. From what I have learned today, this live recording was not ever "officially" released on an album. So, my conclusion is that the recording I am referring too has to be from Pastel Blues. Since Qobuz doesn't offer any definitive version of a recording or album, I cannot offer you a 100% certainty, so therefore I cannot answer your inquiry.
Continued...
