The Noir Forties by Richard Lingeman

Author:Richard Lingeman [Lingeman, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568586908
Publisher: Nation Books

NEW YORK CITY’S ARTISTIC renaissance was echoed in other arts and entertainment forms, from dance and ballet to classical music and opera to Broadway shows. Jazz (Dixieland and bebop) thrived on Fifty-second Street at clubs like the Spotlight, the Three Deuces, Jimmy Ryan’s, the Onyx, Tondelayo’s, and the Hickory House, and in Greenwich Village at the Village Vanguard and the Five Spot. Birdland would become a jumping shrine to Charlie Parker, who lived on the Lower East Side for a time and played bebop with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Charlie Mingus. Radio crooning as exemplified by Frank Sinatra and the big bands of Tommy Dorsey and Harry James packed them in at the Paramount Theater. And the city’s nightlife flowered at glitter spots like the Latin Quarter, Copacabana, and the Stork Club, display cases for the war’s new rich, who ogled the lavish floor shows and the celebrities who themselves came to be ogled and bold-faced in Winchell’s column in the next morning’s Mirror.

A wicked aura of gangsterism hung in the smoky bars that featured jazz artists (the critic Gene Santoro dubbed the atmosphere “jazz noir”). NYPD vice squad cops regularly raided them, acting on the presumption that they condoned drug use and race-mixing. At Café Society, Billie Holiday, a heroin addict and frequent target of the police, sang “Strange Fruit,” one of the most searing protest songs ever performed in a pop venue. It was written by Abel Meeropol, a Jew and a Communist: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black body swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”*

Holiday first sang the song in 1939, and her recording of it eventually sold more than 1 million copies. Meeropol also wrote the words to perhaps the biggest Popular Front hit, “The House I Live In” (music by Earl Robinson), as recorded by Sinatra. Despite (or perhaps because of) the song’s plea for tolerance and brotherhood, the record company excised the original lyrics about black and white people living together. Another popular black artist who clicked with the racially integrated audiences at Café Society was Josh White, who had a hit with “One Meat Ball,” a ballad about a shabby little man who enters a restaurant, orders with his last 15 cents a single meatball, and then meekly asks for bread with it. “You gets no bread with one meatball!” the waiter yells for all to hear.

Blues composer Jerome Felder (Doc Pomus) remembered the synergism of the racially integrated postwar night club crowds: “You felt great energy, great vibes all over the place. I guess the band got ‘sent’ by the crowd, and the crowd got ‘sent’ by the band. In those days, when people went out they would always get dressed up. Not only that but they got along well with each other. There was no racial problems—at least I wasn’t aware of that; there was no such thing as a club that was all black and all white.

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