Barney Josephson

Barney Josephson (February 1, 1902 – September 29, 1988) was the American founder of Café Society in Greenwich Village, New York's first integrated nightclub. Opening artists in 1938 included Billie Holiday, who first performed the song "Strange Fruit" there.

Background Barney Josephson was born on February 1, 1902, in Trenton, New Jersey, the youngest of six children. His Jewish parents had immigrated from Libau, Latvia in 1900. His mother was a seamstress and his father, who died shortly after Barney's birth, was a cobbler. Two of his brothers, Leon and Louis, became lawyers. Josephson graduated from Trenton High School.

He set out to break the norm for nightclubs in the city by making it non-segregated both front of house and behind the scenes, and free of mob influence.

Billie Holiday sang in Café Society's opening show in 1938 and performed there for the next nine months. Josephson set down certain rules around the performance of "Strange Fruit" at the club: it would close Holiday's set; the waiters would stop serving just before it; the room would be in darkness except for a spotlight on Holiday's face; and there would be no encore.

Using $6,000 borrowed from two friends of his brother Leon to start the club, he rented a basement on Sheridan Square. He commissioned prominent Greenwich Village artists, including Sam Berman, Abe Birnbaum, Adolph Dehn, William Gropper, John Groth, Syd Hoff, Anton Refregier and Ad Reinhardt, to decorate the walls with murals. From 1947 to 1949, George Avakian held New York University's first jazz classes at the nightclub. The date of the clubs' closure seems unclear but somewhere between 1948 and 1951.

The Cookery

Josephson subsequently opened a small chain of restaurants in New York, the Cookeries. By late 1969, he had reduced the chain to a single restaurant, at University Place and 8th Street in Greenwich Village.

Josephson closed the Cookery in 1984.

In 2013, the show Café Society Swing opened at the Leicester Square Theatre in London, with a subsequent production in 2014 at 59E59 Theaters in New York

Works

The Famous Cookery Cookbook with Gloria Agrin Josephson (1963) Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People with Terry Trilling-Josephson (foreword by Dan Morgenstern) (2007)