Swinging to the Left: Jazz and the working class
by JONNIE BAKAN
Over the last century, the musical form known as “jazz” has undergone a remarkable shift in its social standing within American culture. Denigrated in the early decades of the 20th century as a “primitive” musical form that could corrupt the morals of its listeners, jazz is now frequently hailed as “America’s Classical Music.”
But one aspect of the development of jazz music has been absent from most accounts of its history – the important role played by the working-class movement in conditioning the changing relationship of jazz music to North American cultural life. The emergence of jazz as a central aspect of the North American popular music industry of the 1930s coincided in both time and place with a massive upsurge in the working class movement, as manifest in the great Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) industrial unionization drives of that decade, and in the widely-based “Popular Front” movement. In 1936, just as big band jazz, or “swing” music was beginning to become the dominant musical form in American popular music, three general strikes occurred in the US. Not coincidentally, Harlem, the artistic epicenter of jazz in the 1930s, emerged as a main center of working-class political activity during that decade.
It was in this social context that, by the late 1930s and early 1940s, many prominent jazz artists had become involved in various aspects of the left-wing movement, including Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, and others. As late as 1951 or 1952, Charlie Parker and Max Roach played a benefit dance in Harlem’s Rockland Palace for Communist leader Ben Davis. Paul Robeson also sang at the event. According to Gerald Horne, the presence of these leading jazz figures at the Communist benefit “was not atypical. Just before this event [the benefit featuring Charlie Parker and Max Roach], Miles Davis’s Orchestra, with J.J. Johnson and Sonny Rollins, played at the preconvention dance of the New York Labor League, a fraternal organization allied with the party. Miles Davis was blunt about this group: ‘They’re on the ball. They know what’s happening.’ But his other comment, ‘This country is beginning to make me neurotic,’ captured the intensifying sentiments of many blacks.”
“strange fruit,” bitter fruit
Perhaps more than any other leading jazz artist, Billie Holiday’s career path was strongly conditioned by her relationship to the left-wing movement. Indeed, the song that first brought Holiday to national attention was her 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit,” a powerful song of protest against the racist practice of lynching, which was composed by Communist Party activist Abel Meeropol (aka Lewis Allen). David Margolick writes that “Somewhere around 1935, Meeropol, in his early 30s at the time, saw a photograph of a particularly ghastly lynching. ‘It… haunted me for days,’ he later recalled. He wrote a poem about it, one which was originally to have appeared in the Communist journal The New Masses but first saw print…as ‘Bitter Fruit’...in the January 1937 issue of The New York Teacher, a union publication.
Meeropol set the poem to music, and in the late 1930s the song was regularly performed in left-wing circles — by the Teachers’ Union chorus, by a black singer named Laura Duncan (at Madison Square Garden), by a quartet of black singers at a fund-raiser for the anti-Fascists during the Spanish Civil War.”
The “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees” is clearly meant to be understood as a lynched person. “Strange Fruit” was the first song to “confront the topic [of lynching] so directly”. Indeed, the explicitly anti-racist and political character of the song’s lyrics mark it as different from anything previously recorded by Holiday, and perhaps any jazz singer. As bass player John Williams put it, “the words were unheard of for a song, especially at that time”.
The May 10, 1939 issue of Variety announced the release of “Strange Fruit” under the headline, “Anti-Lynch Propaganda in Swingtime, on a Disc.” “Propaganda in swingtime will be released next week on a record cut by Billie Holliday [sic] for Commodore Music Shops of New York. Tagged ‘Strange Fruit’ the platter is a musical anti-lynching campaign, vocals pointedly objecting to southern [sic] hangings. It was cut two weeks ago.”
Crossing the Bar
Holiday first recorded and introduced the song into her repertoire while working an extended engagement at Café Society, a nightclub in New York’s Greenwich Village that was itself associated with the left-wing Popular Front movement. As New York’s first major nightclub with an uncompromising policy of complete racial integration, the Café Society represented a hard-won beachhead in the battle for social equality. Helen Lawrenson, who was involved in the club’s early operation, writes, “From the beginning, it was completely integrated: black and white performers, black and white patrons. This had never happened before, outside of a few Harlem places where the whites got the best tables”.
For many in New York, the Café Society and later its sister club, the Café Society (Uptown), offered rare havens from widespread racial bigotry. Its policy of complete intolerance of racial segregation made it perhaps the only nightclub in Manhattan where a mixed-race party could go out for an evening’s entertainment, assured that the club’s management would protect them from harassment. A former patron recalled, “blacks and whites who wanted to go out and spend a nightclub evening together didn’t have too easy a time of it in Manhattan 40 years ago. But they never had any problem at Café Society”.
The Café Society’s owner Barney Josephson was well acquainted with New York’s left-wing movement. While Josephson himself admitted only to being a formal member of the Communist Party for several months in 1937, his brother Leon, who reportedly worked as a business attorney for Café Society, was a prominent figure in the Communist Party. A member of the Workers’ Party since 1924, Leon Josephson was a lawyer for the Communists’ legal organization, the International Labor Defense (ILD), and according to David Stowe, one of “the more prominent and outspoken American communists of the era”. Lawrenson recalls that “An admitted Communist, [Leon] was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948. He refused to answer questions and was sent to prison for contempt”.
The Café Society itself had an unmistakable left-wing ambience. Jerry Zolten has recently written that “one way or another, political point of view [sic] found its way into the content of every show, if not every act. The strategy was to pull in the crowd with great entertainment and sway them with the political message”. The club had a slogan that seems to sum up the atmosphere of self-conscious political transgression that permeated its operation: “The wrong place for the right people.”
Lady sings society blues
For those at Café Society who had a personal commitment to the left-wing movement, Holiday’s nightly performances of “Strange Fruit” would have resonated deeply with their own personal histories of political activity. Stuart Nicholson writes: “For the left-wing audiences at the Café Society, with The New Masses stuffed in their pockets [“Strange Fruit”] represented a powerful message delivered with a powerful punch”.
But even for those club patrons who were not involved in the Popular Front movement, the song would have carried a powerful message, according to Nicholson. “As Billie reached the searing, climactic line, ‘here is a strange and bitter crop’, it was delivered with power and emotion that chilled the blood, forcing her predominantly white, middle-class audience to stare unblinkingly into the face of racist violence”.
Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit” generated a good deal of critical controversy. The song became a minor “hit,” reaching the 16th position on the record charts of the day. And while “Strange Fruit” appears neither to have been Holiday’s first, nor her greatest chart-topper – her recording of “Carelessly,” for example, reached number 1 for three weeks in 1937 – the song’s success marked a crucial turning point in the singer’s career. Burnett James notes that “[Holiday] never did make the top line with the general public or command the huge audiences she once hoped for, but once or twice she came near to it. The first time was in 1939, when she sang and recorded a number written specially for her [see above].... It was called Strange Fruit and it dealt with the lynching of Negroes in the South…. Whatever else may be said, her name became inseparably linked with it for the rest of her life”.
In her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday herself comments “I opened Café Society as an unknown; I left two years later as a star.”
Accounts of Holiday’s early career contain multiple descriptions of the various personal and professional obstacles she faced, all posed by the systemic constraints of a racist and commercialized cultural environment. But things changed when Holiday began her artistic residence within the counter-hegemonic haven provided by Café Society, and, following the introduction of “Strange Fruit” into her repertoire, Holiday finally began to receive widespread critical acclaim.
By the late 1930s, a large left-wing political and cultural movement in the United States had developed to the point where it could actually establish its own performance venues, of which Café Society was just one of the more prominent. When Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” at Café Society, she unambiguously identified her own artistic voice with the left-wing movement, while the movement simultaneously provided a large and responsive audience for the singer’s music. Angela Davis writes that “Holiday realized… that ‘Strange Fruit’ would afford her a mode of expression that merged her own individual sensibility, including her hatred of racist-inspired brutality, with the rage of a potential community of resistance”. It was this mutual relationship between artist and movement that allowed Holiday to emerge from Café Society, in her own words, as “a star.” As Davis writes, “Before the vast movements of the 1930s and the consequent radicalization of large sectors of the population the phenomenon of ‘Strange Fruit’ would have been inconceivable…. New York’s interracial Café Society… could not have existed earlier”.
Today Billie Holiday occupies a central, even iconic status among the popularly recognized pantheon of “jazz greats” who constitute the “jazz tradition.” Nonetheless the highly politicized dynamics that propelled her towards national fame, and her important relationship to the working-class and anti-racist movement of her day, have been almost entirely overlooked in virtually every popular history of “America’s Classical music.” ★
Jonnie Bakan is a musician, musicologist, and member/activist in CUPE local 3903
