Early on in Billie Holiday’s 1956 memoir Lady Sings the Blues, she recalls the picaresque world of New York nightlife in the Thirties:
Prohibition was on its last legs then. And so were the blind pigs, the cribs and clubs and after-hours joints that Prohibition set up in business. Some people thought it would go on like that forever. But you can call the roll of the wonderful joints that thrived before repeal in 1933—they’re mostly memories now: Basement Brownies, the Yea Man, the Alhambra, Mexico, the Next, the Clam House, the Shim Sham, the Covan, the Morocco, the Spider Web.
Get a load of those names! So evocative of a vanished world of bathtub gin, sweat-soaked tuxedos, small clubs fogged with high-tar cigarette smoke. You can taste the sin and glamour on the tip of your dehydrated tongue. For Holiday this was recent history, to us as distant as chain mail and apothecaries. The world that shaped her may have ebbed to a soft faraway glow, but Billie still feels contemporary, a presence in the room.
Read Full Article »