Café Society

Overview

Barney Josephson's basement cabaret at Sheridan Square, the first racially integrated nightclub in downtown New York, billed as 'the wrong place for the Right people', where Billie Holiday debuted 'Strange Fruit' in 1939 and boogie-woogie pianists launched a national craze.

Café Society opened December 18, 1938, in the basement of 1 Sheridan Square, a rented room that Barney Josephson, a 36-year-old shoe salesman from Trenton with no nightclub experience, built on $6,000 borrowed from his brother Leon and two friends. The name was a deliberate insult aimed at the velvet-rope world: Josephson had heard Clare Boothe Luce use 'café society' to flatter the city's upscale nightlife habitués, and he capitalized the R in his tagline ('The wrong place for the Right people') to make the politics unmistakable. His reference points were the anti-fascist political cabarets he had observed in Berlin and Prague and the Harlem clubs he resented precisely because they extracted labor from Black performers while barring Black customers. From opening night Café Society seated Black and white patrons at the same tables, employed Black and white staff behind the footlights and in the kitchen, and rejected the mob connections and girlie-line conventions that defined most New York rooms. No dancing, no smutty gags, no Uncle Tom comedy. Josephson recruited John Hammond, already the era's most consequential jazz producer, who had just staged the two landmark 'From Spirituals to Swing' concerts at Carnegie Hall in December 1938 and 1939, as informal music director and talent scout. The opening lineup positioned the room's aesthetic immediately: Billie Holiday, Big Joe Turner, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis (the last three introducing boogie-woogie to a Greenwich Village audience as a three-piano rotation). Holiday's nine-month early residency produced the room's defining moment: in early 1939, on three consecutive nights, she debuted 'Strange Fruit,' a poem by white Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol set to music, confronting lynching directly. Josephson's staging instructions were precise, the song would close her set; waiters would stop service; the room would go dark except for a single spot on her face; no encore. Columbia Records refused to release it; Holiday recorded it for Commodore in April 1939, eventually selling over a million copies. Among the long-tenured performers Hammond and Josephson developed: pianist Hazel Scott (1939–1943, both locations, seven-plus years in total), dancer Pearl Primus, gospel groups the Golden Gate Quartet and the Dixie Hummingbirds (introduced to white audiences here), Big Joe Turner (five-plus years), Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Mary Lou Williams, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and (briefly) Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Django Reinhardt. The walls were covered in satirical murals commissioned from a roster of left-wing visual artists, Sam Berman, Abe Birnbaum, Ad Reinhardt, Adolph Dehn, William Gropper, Anton Refregier, Syd Hoff, Christina Malman, and others, paid $125 each plus a house tab; the décor included a painted monkey that resembled Hitler dangling from a pipe. In 1940, Josephson opened a second location (Café Society Uptown at 128 East 58th Street, on the Upper East Side) targeting a different audience and featuring wall art by Anton Refregier. The two-branch model ran until the HUAC years destroyed it. The FBI had opened a file on John Hammond in 1941 and a 2,100-page dossier on Josephson himself by 1943. When Barney's brother Leon (who had co-signed the original loan and later became the clubs' attorney) refused to answer House Un-American Activities Committee questions in 1947, columnists Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell attacked both brothers in print as communist sympathizers. Business at the two clubs dropped by roughly 45 percent within three weeks. After losses exceeded $90,000 Josephson sold both clubs; he completed the sale on March 2, 1949. New operators ran the downtown room for a further two years until IRS agents seized the space in 1951 for unpaid back taxes. The room at 1 Sheridan Square continued to house successive chapters of Village countercultural life: an off-Broadway theater in the 1960s (where Alvin Ailey appeared in 'Call Me by My Rightful Name' in 1961), a 'unisex' club called Haven that was repeatedly raided by police in 1970, a Gay Activists Alliance club in 1973, and (from 1978 to 1995) the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Charles Ludlam's queer avant-garde troupe that produced 29 full-length plays in the space before Ludlam's death from AIDS in 1987. Axis Theatre Company has occupied the basement since 1998. Josephson himself opened a hamburger-and-music restaurant, The Cookery, in the Village (University Place and 8th Street), which ran from 1953 to 1984; in the late 1960s and '70s he used it to resume the Café Society practice of resurrecting overlooked artists, booking Mary Lou Williams, Alberta Hunter (returning after twenty years of work as a nurse), and Helen Humes. He died in 1988. His recorded memoir, edited by his widow Terry Trilling-Josephson, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2009.

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