Thu 26 Feb 2009
Barney & Terry Trilling-Josephson
David Brent Johnson posts an article that he wrote in 2000 about the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit” in advance of his radio interview this weekend on WFIU with Terry Trilling-Josephson, co-author of Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People.
April 26th, 2009 at 11:29 am
My father, Louis Gross, was Barney’s accountant from the 30’s into the early 60’s and I fondly remember visiting the various Cookery restaurants and seeing Barney in the 50’s and early 60’s. Unfortunately Barney and my father parted company in the early 60’s, just before I developed a lifelong passion for jazz. I just finished reading the book, and its stories have fleshed out the details of many things my father told me when I was too young to appreciate what Barney had accomplished. There were many names of people my father had told me about, including Billie Holiday, Zero Mostel, Hazel Scott, Jack Gilford, Edmund Hall and Susan Reed. Thank you for publishing this book and refreshing my memories of Barney and the Cookery.