by John Szwed
Shaw’s was not the first white band to use a black singer—Jimmy Dorsey’s band had June Richmond, and Claude Thornhill recorded with Maxine Sullivan. But Shaw meant to tour with her not just as a band singer, or an equal to the other band members, but as a star, and soon his picture and hers were together at the front of theaters and dance halls. He knew she wouldn’t want to sing the latest hits, what the dancers wanted to hear, and that he would be under pressure to get someone who would. If the singer to be dispensed with was black, it could be all the easier if it was worked right, so nasty rumors were spread by song publishers to force him to drop her. Down Beat ran an editorial denouncing what it called a whisper campaign. Shaw resisted and then took the band on a tour of the South, a crazed freedom ride before its time, with Billie being escorted into hotels and restaurants by the toughest members of the band, demanding she be accommodated. Billie never hesitated to take on drunks and belligerent bigots, either, resulting in the band’s having some late-night escapes from Southern law enforcement across county lines. Artie took musical chances, too, sometimes departing from dance tunes and pop songs to let the band loose to jam on the blues for a half hour late in their sets, with Billie coming in and out with bits of her own made-up blues lyrics while the baffled dancers just stood around.
The band barely survived, even by playing New England boys’ prep schools that wouldn’t allow girl singers on the campus, and girls’ schools where a Cuban arrangement of “Jungle Drums” created ecstatic upheavals among the students. As things got tougher financially and the future of the group was in doubt, compromises were made. When Billie gave her notice that she would be leaving, Artie hired Helen Forrest to be a second singer for a month while she learned the tunes. To keep Billie with the band, Artie and the musicians quietly lowered their own salaries to pay her. Forrest’s account of the month she traveled with Billie and the band suggests that both Holiday and Shaw were modest in the few words that each wrote about what were in fact their rather heroic efforts on the road:
She treated me well. The band’s vocal arrangements were written for her, so I sat around. She’d say to Artie, “Why don’t you let this child sing?” He’d say, “She hasn’t got any arrangements yet.” And she’d say, “Well, let her use mine. But don’t let her sit there doing nothing all night.” But we sang in different keys and her arrangements didn’t fit me.
Lots of times she wasn’t allowed to sit on the bandstand with me. She had to use the back entrance and wait backstage to go on. Artie used to say she had to sit on the stage or the band would walk off, but she’d beg him not to get into trouble because of her, and he’d give in. If I didn’t want to sit on the stand without her she’d tell me not to cause trouble for myself, and I’d give in. The funny thing is that everyone says that she finally gave up when the band got to New York for its big opening at the Lincoln Hotel and she wasn’t allowed to sit on the stand, but the fact is there wasn’t any room for any singers on the bandstand and we both waited at a table up front for our turn. Maybe the fuss was because we sat together.
I used to tell her I didn’t want her to leave, that the thought of her leaving made me feel bad, and I hoped it wasn’t because of me. She said, “Sweetheart, it’s not your fault. The band’s got the greatest singer in the world and it doesn’t need me anymore. I don’t want to be a band singer and the life I’ve been living is not for me. I got to go and I’m going.”
Once again Billie had signed a contract with a recording company other than the band leader’s, so she was not able to make recordings with Shaw’s band. The only evidence that remains on record of the Shaw-Holiday social and musical experiment is a single song, “Any Old Time” from 1938, written for her by Shaw.
Though well sung with a pleasant arrangement, it gives only a hint of what this inspired meeting of talents must have sounded like. It was recorded at the same session that produced “Begin the Beguine,” the Cole Porter piece that launched Artie Shaw into fame, but by then Billie had already left the band, having grown sick of what she called “major NAACP-type productions” that it took for her to get something to eat, a place to stay, or even a bathroom in the South. There were debates over whether she should sit on the bandstand or just appear for her songs, the usual separate-but-unequal routine for a mixed-race stage performance, in the North or South. But it was in the North where she was finally pushed too far. While playing in the Blue Room in the Hotel Lincoln in New York, famous for its radio broadcasts of swing bands, the owner Maria de Ramirez Kramer asked Billie to use a freight elevator so that customers would not think that people of color were welcome there as guests (or possibly as prostitutes). Columnist Walter Winchell called the hotel out for its treatment, and John Hammond was quoted as noting the irony that “it was in the Hotel Lincoln!”
• • • • •
When she left Shaw’s band in 1938, Billie was back at work in three weeks as the star attraction at the opening of Café Society, and two weeks later she was on the Camel Caravan radio show singing with the Benny Goodman band. Meanwhile, in 1940, Lena Horne was hired to sing with the Charlie Barnet band, a rival of Shaw’s, and she later said that it was Billie that Barnet really wanted, but Billie wasn’t interested. In an interview, Billie said she would never sing with a big band again. She and Shaw exchanged some acrimonious remarks in the press about each other’s role in her departure, but they later spoke favorably of each other for the rest of their lives. Shaw, after reaching a level of success that few ever achieve in recordings, radio, and film, withdrew from swing, the music he had helped create, and went on to study higher math, produce movies, and work on a two-thousand-page novel.
Café Society
Holiday was fortunate to have done most of her recording with four producers who were among the most important in the history of jazz in the United States: John Hammond, Milt Gabler, Norman Granz, and Barney Josephson, all of whom had the insight and courage to introduce jazz to the country and the world by changing the way the music was heard, creating new conditions for hearing it, and breaking down barriers to those who would get to hear it.
Josephson, a shoe salesman from New Jersey, seemed an unlikely person to change the social and cultural life of Manhattan. Raised in a socially conscious and committed leftist family with modest resources, he was one of the non-elite whites who went up to Harlem to hear jazz. He had also traveled to Europe, where he visited political cabarets that inspired him to open a similar club in New York, though his would be built around jazz, with the twist that they would feature and welcome people of color. It would not be the first New York City nightspot without racial barriers, as many Harlem clubs were open to whites, but this was to be a downtown club that would make a point of welcoming black audiences as well as presenting whites and blacks together on the same stage. Josephson had a fever for jazz, and saw the music not as a form of crude good-time music or as part of a cultural underground, but rather as the quintessentially high art of America that had reached its apogee through the creative efforts of African Americans. All it needed was the proper exposure.
Josephson gave his club, with its basement location, affordable prices, doorman in a ragged tuxedo, and New Yorker–esque cartoon murals of blue bloods, the name Café Society as a mockery of uptown society. The performers stood on the same level as and close to the audience, and were theatrically lit. Despite its Depression high-low shtick, the club nonetheless had a culturally elegant aura, created by the brilliance and originality of the performers and the presence of people of color mixing with like-minded individuals onstage and in the audience. Clare Boothe Luce called it the wrong place for the right people.
Josephson had been excited by the daring concept behind John Hammond’s most significant effort, the “From Spirituals to Swing” concerts he produced at Carnegie Hall in 1938 and 1939, which attempted to trace the musical history of African American folk, religious, and jazz music. When Barney saw the oversold house and the wild enthusi
asm of the audience for these events, he attempted to re-create them by using some of the same performers from that concert and extending the concept even further with a wider variety of singers, modern dancers, and comedians. He would feature the likes of singers Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Lead Belly, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Golden Gate Quartet, and Hazel Scott; dancer Pearl Primus; musicians Albert Ammons, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Pete Johnson, Big Joe Turner, Lester Young, Django Reinhardt, Buck Clayton, Big Sid Catlett, James P. Johnson, Red Allen, and Mary Lou Williams; comedians Zero Mostel, Imogene Coca, Jack Gilford, Sid Caesar, Carol Channing, and Danny Kaye; and actors/singers Judy Holliday, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green.
The audiences at the Café were an odd mix of left-wing intellectuals, the wealthy, black and white show business people, jazz musicians, and Greenwich Village locals. One might find among them Edward R. Murrow, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Martha Graham, Ezio Pinza, Leopold Stokowski, Gypsy Rose Lee, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Fiorello La Guardia, and even, once, Eleanor Roosevelt.
Today, it might be easy to mock the degree to which whites in the audiences were moved by songs about the toil and suffering of black folks, and to regard some of the performances as merely protest on demand. But whatever their politics, audiences were being exposed to performers they had never seen in uptown nightspots and were seated alongside people they had never been close to anywhere else in the city.
Despite full houses every night, Josephson was so inexperienced at management that he ran out of money within weeks, and was kept in business only through a loan from Hammond, Benny Goodman, and Willard Alexander. But within a year the club was such a success that he opened a second nightery, Café Society Uptown, in a cavernous, high-ceilinged space that seated 350 people.
• • • • •
The first Café Society opened on the night before New Year’s Eve in 1938, with Billie Holiday as the star attraction. This venue presented her with new faces in the audience, a different political ambience, and a fresh take on cabaret culture. Instead of strolling from table to table, directing her songs to different individuals, or bantering with them, she remained in the stage area. There was now a book of music arrangements with formal introductions and dramatic endings, a house band, rehearsals, and songs focusing on her as a soloist rather than as a band singer. All this created a distinct break between singer and audience; shouts or comments from the audience, whether supportive or antagonistic, were tolerated but not encouraged, and the relaxed atmosphere that had made the Harlem cabaret a home away from home was gone.
She did three sets a night of six songs each. The modes of performance were now those of Eastern Europe and Paris as much as they were African American. Despite the grumbling of some in the past about her professionalism, Josephson never had any complaints about Billie’s work:
I always looked on Billie as a finished performer, a pro. I never had to tell her to change her numbers, whereas I had to tell everyone else. I had to tell Lena Horne when she was just starting out. But you don’t tell professionals how to work. . . . You’d be out of your mind to tell her anything. Billie was meticulous about her work. She would come down and raise hell with the orchestra. She was tough! If Frankie Newton played a note that disturbed her while she was singing, he heard about it. If the pianist was one note behind or too fast, she picked it up. The four-letter words you’d hear! Well, she would let out a tirade and they’d be scared to death of her. The respect I had for her, they had, and I think even more so because they were musicians. It was always Lady Day, and when they said “Lady,” it was like Lady Montgomery of Great Britain.
• • • • •
Billie Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit” was released in 1939, the same year that Gone with the Wind was breaking box office records and Marian Anderson was barred from singing in Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Race, then as now, haunted America, and entertainment media mirrored its anxieties through carefully controlled means. If it was possible to sell images of race to a broad population without losing the white South and a significant portion of the North, or violating the unwritten codes of racial interaction, Hollywood would do so, regardless of the bending of history that it took to tell a story. So it was that no black crime or black criminals were shown in the 1940s movies that ironically became known as film noir. African Americans could be drafted and sent overseas to serve in the military, but they were never shown to be part of the war effort except as cooks and orderlies. There was no portrayal of interracial love, no shared meals, not even a handshake, and no black person was called “Mr.,” “Miss,” or “Mrs.” There was no chance, then, that the lynching of blacks would ever appear in a film in the thirties and forties, no matter how often it was reported in newspapers. This was the vision of America into which Billie Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit” would intrude.
It was not the first song about lynching. Some earlier pieces, such as Bessie Smith’s “Haunted House Blues” and Lead Belly’s “Hangman’s Blues” and “The Gallis Pole,” had veiled allusions to lynching, but the first published song was “Sistren an’ Brethren,” an African American folk song collected by Lawrence Gellert, published in the New Masses in January 1931, and reprinted in various places thereafter. The next published, and more widely known, piece was Irving Berlin’s “Supper Time,” sung by Ethel Waters in the 1933 stage production of As Thousands Cheer. In the scene in which the song is featured, a mother sits in her kitchen thinking about how she should tell her children that their father is dead. A large newspaper headline about lynching is spread across the back wall of the stage. It was a shocking song to see in the context of a Manhattan revue, but those who heard it only as a song apart from its theatrical setting might have understood it as just another “my man done gone” bluesy tune.
• • • • •
Abel Meeropol, a New York City high school teacher who wrote under the name Lewis Allan, published a poem titled “Bitter Fruit” in the union magazine New York Teacher in January 1937. For years there had been efforts to make lynching a federal crime, but Congress and the president had refused to act on the matter. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to support the only bill that stood a chance of passing.) Meeropol wanted to do something to raise public awareness of these acts of violence, and in late 1938 he set the poem to music. After his wife and others sang it publicly, the New Theatre League published it under the title “Strange Fruit” in 1939. A choral arrangement was then made by Earl Robinson (the composer of “The House I Live In,” a song that Frank Sinatra later made famous), with alterations in the melody and harmony and with a line added from the Negro spiritual “Go Down, Moses.” It went through further musical changes by the Edward B. Marks Music Company when Allan published it with them in 1939.
The newly hired floor show director of Café Society, Robert Gordon, had heard it sung at a union meeting and showed it to Barney Josephson and Billie Holiday. Josephson claimed that she was initially not enthusiastic about adding it to her songlist, and when he heard her sing it with little emotion in one of its first performances, he assumed she didn’t comprehend its meaning. Later, when she cried during one of her renditions of it, he concluded that she had finally come to understand it. It seems very strange that he assumed that any person of color in the United States in 1939 would not know the song’s meaning. Billie certainly understood it on the night in 1958 that she sang it for Maya Angelou and her little son, and then explained its lyrics graphically to the child, upsetting the boy and Angelou. In Lady Sings the Blues Billie wrote that when she was first shown the song, she “dug it right off. It seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop,” drawing attention to the death of her father, Clarence Holiday, whom she believed had died when he returned from World War I and was refused treatment at a white veterans hospital in Dallas. She undoubtedly also knew the widely told account of Bessie Smith, who was believed
at the time to have died under similar circumstances. Billie’s only concern about the song, she said, was that audiences might hate it.
She had reason to worry, as nothing like this piece had ever been attempted in popular music. It was an adult song, one that could not be counted on to appeal to the key demographic of teenage fans, or even to most mature audiences. The genre that was to be called protest songs was not recognized until the late 1950s, so the shock of hearing such words and sentiments in pop ballad form was all the greater when she sang it in 1939. As Ralph Ellison wrote in Going to the Territory in 1986, “The ultimate goal of lynchers is that of achieving ritual purification through destroying the lynchers’ identification with the basic humanity of their victims. Hence their deafness to cries of pain, their stoniness before the sight and stench of burning flesh . . .” Holiday’s intention was to disrupt that ritual, but she also feared that if she interpreted a song in too emotional a manner, she would be accused of sentimentality, or worse. (A few years later James Baldwin would write, “It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.”) She was changing the rules by which songs were presented to audiences, and more pointedly breaking the pop social contract, such as it was, between black singers and white audiences. She would not just be entertaining them, but instead bringing to light a subject scarcely even mentioned in song before, and one that could evoke powerful emotions. Café Society was one of the few nightclubs, white or black, where a song like this could be performed without potential for trouble.
Josephson made very sure that the audience got it. He programmed “Strange Fruit” at the end of every one of the three nightly sets, ensuring that it would be the final encore; he ordered the club’s entire staff to cease activities while Billie sang; and he turned out all the house lights, with the exception of a small spotlight on her face. When the song ended, there was always a long silence, followed by a huge ovation. She then left the room without comment or acknowledgment, after which the musicians began playing in a lighter mood to help the audience resume normal club behavior.