Maxine Sullivan, Village Vanguard, NYC, ca March 1947. Photography by William P. Gottlieb. 

"As I was reminded repeatedly during the four years I spent researching and writing Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital, the Village music scene hardly started (in the sixties); in fact, it went back even further than the stories I’d heard of Billie Holiday singing 'Strange Fruit' at the long-gone Sheridan Square club Café Society in the Thirties. Classical music concerts were held in Washington Square Park in the nineteenth century, for instance.

"Since its inception, Greenwich Village had functioned as both sanctuary and battleground. Galleries, small presses, and enough writers with enough works to line the shelves of a small library were drawn to its narrow, crooked, often con-fusing streets and ambience."- David Browne

ARTICLE: How Greenwich Village’s Iconic, Iconoclastic Music Scene Came to Be