The Venues

The Cotton Club

Harlem's Cotton Club was named for the light brown color of un-dyed cotton: the skin color of female entertainers it presented to its all-white audience. Though the Cotton Club was one of the few places whites came to hear black musicians, the club's strict policy allowed blacks only on stage, not in the audience.

The club was owned by Owney Madden, a well-known gangster and bootlegger. He ran the business for a period from Sing Sing Prison, where he served time for manslaughter. Throughout the Prohibition years, the club served as a high-priced speakeasy featuring black revues written by white writers. After Prohibition, the Cotton Club moved to 48th Street, where it continued to operate until 1940.

Café Society

On the opposite end of Manhattan, in Greenwich Village, was a nightspot called Caf� Society, as distant in spirit from the Cotton Club as it was in location. Barney Josephson opened Caf� Society after he sold his New Jersey shoe store. His vision was to create a place where blacks and whites could come together; Caf� Society became the first racially integrated nightclub in America. A vibrant hub for music and politics, its slogan read, 'The Wrong Place for the Right People'. It was here, with the support of Josephson, that Billie Holiday began to reach a wide audience, and where she sang a song she would be famous for, "Strange Fruit."

Many of Caf� Society's patrons and performers were of a radical or left wing stripe. In the 1950s, during McCarthy's "red scare," many were branded as enemies, investigated and blacklisted. Josephson was forced out of business and the club was shut down.

Tin Pan Alley

The Blues and traditional Yiddish sound became essential ingredients of popular music, synthesized in a place called Tin Pan Alley, where a thriving sheet music business predated the recording industry.

Tin Pan Alley was named after its location in an alley off 14th Street, near the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Here, music publishers kept their offices alongside tiny studios where songwriters banged out new tunes on old, metallic-sounding upright pianos. People passing by said the resulting clamor sounded like pans being beaten, and the name was born.

Tin Pan Alley physically changed location, following New York's pleasure center up Broadway and eventually landing in the Brill Building just north of Times Square. The Alley's largely Jewish songwriters continued writing tunes that became standards and provided the melodic backbone of jazz, as that improvisatory music evolved into be-bop. The Brill building, where many Tin Pan Alley songwriters worked, would eventually become home to rock and roll songwriters. While musical styles inevitably changed, the social dynamic remained the same as it was when Irving Berlin discovered ragtime.