Summer of '39

In Chapter 6 Bobby recounts his courtship of Karen, which culminated in their summer romance before she left New York for Leningrad. I thought it would be fun to spend the next few days investigating the songs that would have been the soundtrack of that summer, played on radios and jukeboxes throughout New York.

The first, and most surprising to me, is Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit. It surprised me because it's a protest song against American racism, a subject I wouldn't have suspected to be mainstream in 1939. And yet it both reached number 4 on the charts and eventually sold over a million copies. You can hear it here:

https://youtu.be/h4ZyuULy9zs