We now fast-forward to the end of act 2 — the crisis. In Josh White’s case, as for so many of his contemporaries, this came in the form of the blacklist.
He had been on top of the world, playing to packed houses in New York (sometimes with guest appearances by his young song Josh Jr.), touring, acting in plays, appearing in movies:
He had been known as the “Presidential minstrel” during the Roosevelt administration, and remained close to Eleanor after Franklin’s death. In fact, says our friend Wikipedia,
White had reached the zenith of his career when touring with Eleanor Roosevelt on a celebrated and triumphant Goodwill tour of Europe. He had been hosted by the continent’s prime ministers and royal families, and had just performed before 50,000 cheering fans at Stockholm’s soccer stadium. Amidst this tour, while in Paris [actually London] in June 1950, White received a call from Mary Chase, his manager in New York, telling him that Red Channels (who had been sending newsletters to the media since 1947 about… artists who they warned were subversive) had just released and distributed a thick magazine with subversive details regarding 151 artists from the entertainment and media industries whom they labeled communist sympathizers. White’s name was prominent on this list.
Over the last few weeks I’ve ended up spending more time than I would have expected sorting through the various versions of Josh White songs. There is a wide variance in quality, and what you see is not always what you get. You might think, for example, that tracks from The Complete Recorded Works — an actual professional release that they ask money for — would not sound like shit. But you’d be wrong.
So rather than have all that effort go to waste, I decided to create a YouTube playlist, starting with tracks from the 40s that have fallen through the cracks one way or another, and demonstrate the depth and breadth of the man’s repertoire. We’ll start with “Waltzing Matilda,” which he learned while appearing at a benefit concert on a bill with the Royal Australian Air Force.
This is my first time embedding a playlist, so let me know if it gives you any trouble. Peace.
For you aspiring filmmakers, here are a few suggestions for the soundtrack. I’m not sure what we should call this thing; “Café Society” has been used too many times already, including by Woody Allen in 2016. Even if Woody hadn’t been canceled on G.P. (though they’ll take away my Bananas DVD when they pry it from my cold, dead hands), that does not seem like a film one wants to be associated with. The best review I could find was from the New York Times, which only managed the tepid headline “‘Café Society’ Isn’t Woody Allen’s Worst Movie.”
“Café Society Blues” might be better, and as it happens that is already the name of a song by Count Basie, so that might be a good place to start.
And of course Josh White’s “One Meat Ball” would have to be on there:
Given that very little documentary footage of Café Society seems to exist — unless it’s moldering in a warehouse somewhere, like the 1969 film that was exhumed to create Summer of Soul, hopefully coming soon to a theater near me — someone needs to make a fictional re-creation, maybe the same people who did the recent Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. It would be tricky, but I think it could be done.
One key point to get across would be the political tension of the times. Outside the doors of the club, World War II was raging, and some of the artists “would do six shows a night, three benefits and our regular sets, and we would sell war bonds,” according to singer Susan Reed. But this was tricky for Black performers, who had to do their part in the face of continual reminders that they were not equal in their own country. One time, says Elijah Wald, Josh White was asked to appear in
a morale-boosting program at a munitions factory in New Jersey…. Though he and [collaborator Waring] Cuney had written “Defense Factory Blues” some time earlier, he had not planned to sing that song in the revue, preferring to concentrate on patriotic material. Then… Josh found a guard barring him from the factory’s segregated restaurant when he went in to get a glass of milk before the show. First nonplussed, then furious, he ended by taking the stage and singing “Defense Factory,” with its angry request that if blacks were to be enlisted in the defense of democracy, they be given “some democracy to defend.”
“Yes, folks, that’s a song I wish I never knew about…. If there was no discrimination against the colored man, I’d give up singing it in a minute. The songs I really enjoy singing are those that symbolize the kind of world we’d all like to live in — songs of hope — of the good people all over the world — they’re the songs that I like best — because that’s what my brother Bill is out there in Italy fighting for.”
Nor did racism stop at the doors of the club. Black performers would sometimes have to deal with redneck hecklers, though often as not the other patrons would police the situation. Other scuffles arose from Josh White’s unique and fearless style of, em, audience engagement . “He was the first black person to use sex appeal on white audiences,” says his son Josh Jr. “And he was lucky he didn’t get killed for it.”
If you look up “Café Society” on yer Wikipedia, you’ll see this:
Leaving aside for the moment the rather opinionated first line, it is the first of these bullets that we are concerned with here. Of the three movies mentioned, none has anything to do with the nightclub, which would seem ripe for the documentary treatment. But filmic evidence is thin on the ground; it may well be that clubgoers of the day didn’t care to have cameras around. (And good for them.)
If you click through you’ll see that Café Society was “the first racially integrated night club in the United States,” founded by one Barney Josephson in imitation of European cabarets. In his 1988 New York Times obituary, Josephson is quoted as saying:
I wanted a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front. There wasn’t, so far as I know, a place like it in New York or in the whole country.
Josephson himself was Jewish and had been a shoe salesman before deciding to go into showbiz. According to Elijah Wald’s Society Blues, “He had often been to the Cotton Club — the famous Harlem showcase for black entertainers, where the few black customers were seated at the back — and the Kit Kat Club, which had an all-black staff and entertainment policy but barred blacks from the audience…. He thought New York was ready for a different kind of room.”
