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Article

Alvarado, Melba  

Nancy Raquel Mirabal

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born Melba Haydez Alvarado Mejias on 15 August 1919 in Oriente, Cuba. On 19 May 1936, at age 16, Alvarado migrated to New York City with her mother, Mariana Mejias Alvarado, and five younger siblings to reunite with her father, Luis Alvarado, who had left Cuba to escape the oppressive regime of President Gerardo Machado. Alvarado, who never married, made her home in the Bronx. For over sixty years she has directed and organized El Club Cubano Inter-americano (CCI), one of the longest running and most important Afro-Cuban clubs in New York. She is the only woman to be elected president of the CCI twice, in 1957 and 1972. She has also served the organization in a number of leadership capacities, including in public relations, as secretary and treasurer, and as president of the CCI’s Comité de Damas (Women’s Club).

Founded on 17 September 1945 in ...

Article

Arrascaeta, Benjamín “Chiquito Arrascaeta”  

Mario Angel Silva Castro

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

of Afro-Uruguayan culture, was born in Montevideo on 26 December 1942. His parents were Fausto Arrascaeta, a recognized candombe dancer and gramillero, and María Estela Tabárez. He completed primary school and three years at the Escuela de Artes Aplicadas (today known as Escuela de Artes y Artesanías Dr. Pedro Figari). He was accepted to study for a business license at the Universidad del Trabajo del Uruguay (UTU). His training as a percussionist started at a very young age, under the influence of family members and neighbors. He married María Dolores García (who died in 2001), and they had three children: Adriana, Alejandro, and Rosana. In 2003 he met Irma Pereyra, with whom he began a relationship.

Arrascaeta was raised in the “Charrúa” tenement, a house where many Afro-Uruguayan families lived. Located in the Barrio Cordón Sur, this tenement at Calle Charrúa 2026 maintained the candombe tradition ...

Article

Bowen, Ruth Jean  

Angela Black

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

business owner and entertainment promoter, was born in Danville, Virginia, to Claude Carlton and Marion Baskerville, about whom little is known. Ruth attended the Westmoreland Elementary School and Langston High School in Danville. Ruth's family moved to New York City when she was a teenager, and she graduated from Girls High School in Brooklyn. After attending New York University for two years, she met and fell in love with Wallace “Billy” Bowen, a member of the popular Ink Spots, one of the few entertainment groups in the 1940s and 1950s to break the race barrier and perform for white audiences across the United States. Bowen left school and she and Billy were married until his death in 1982.

Bowen managed the daily office responsibilities of her husband s business She also traveled the United States with the Ink Spots during their concert tours During the 1940s the Bowens ...

Article

Bradford, Perry  

Barry Kernfeld

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

blues and vaudeville songwriter, publisher, and musical director, was born John Henry Perry Bradford in Montgomery, Alabama, the son of Adam Bradford, a bricklayer and tile setter, and Bella (maiden name unknown), a cook. Standard reference books give his year of birth as 1893, but Bradford's autobiography gives 1895. Early in his youth Bradford learned to play piano by ear. In 1901 his family moved to Atlanta, where his mother cooked meals for prisoners in the adjacent Fulton Street jail. There he was exposed to the inmates' blues and folk singing. Bradford attended Molly Pope School through the sixth grade and claimed to have attended Atlanta University for three years, there being no local high school. This is chronologically inconsistent, however, with his claim to have joined Allen's New Orleans Minstrels in the fall of 1907 traveling to New Orleans for Mardi Gras ...

Article

Brown, E. C.  

Eric Ledell Smith

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

businessman and banker, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Robert Brown, a turnkey in the local jail, and Anne Brown, a homemaker. E. C. Brown was the eldest of three children. He attended the public schools in Philadelphia and after his high school graduation worked for three years as a mail clerk at the financial firm of Bradstreet Mercantile. He took stenography and typewriting classes at the Spencerian Business College in Philadelphia and subsequently worked as a stenographer for the National Railway Company but was soon laid off. Brown then became secretary to a Frank Thompson, who ran a catering business in Florida in the late 1890s. Around 1901 Brown left Thompson and started a real estate business in Newport News, Virginia. By 1908 he was renting more than 300 houses and had more than 800 tenants. On 27 June 1908 he opened the Crown Savings Bank ...

Article

Childers, Lulu Vere  

Doris Evans McGinty

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Lulu Vere Childers was born in Dryridge, Kentucky, the daughter of former slaves Alexander Childers and Eliza Butler. She studied voice at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and in 1896 was awarded a diploma that was replaced by a bachelor's degree in 1906 when the conservatory began granting degrees. The Oberlin Conservatory chapter of Pi Kappa Lambda, a national honor society, elected her a member in 1927. She studied voice further with Sydney Lloyd Wrightson at the Washington Conservatory of Music, with William Shakespeare, and with Oscar Devries at Chicago Musical College.

As a singer Childers enjoyed modest distinction. During her college years and shortly afterward, she performed in the Midwest with the Eckstein-Norton Music Company, a quartet of singers and their accompanist teamed with concert pianist Harriet A. Gibbs The group contributed their earnings to the development of a music conservatory at Eckstein Norton University ...

Article

Childers, Lulu Vere  

Doris Evans McGinty

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

singer and educator, was born in Dryridge, Kentucky, the daughter of Alexander Childers and Eliza Butler, former slaves. She studied voice at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and in 1896 was awarded a diploma that was replaced by a bachelor's degree in 1906, when the conservatory began granting degrees. The Oberlin Conservatory chapter of Pi Kappa Lambda, a national honor society, elected her a member in 1927. She studied voice further with Sydney Lloyd Wrightson at the Washington Conservatory of Music in Washington, D.C., with William Shakespeare, and with Oscar Devries at Chicago Musical College.

As a singer Childers enjoyed modest distinction. During her college years and shortly afterward, she performed in the Midwest with the Eckstein-Norton Music Company, a quartet of singers and their accompanist teamed with the concert pianist Harriet A. Gibbs The group contributed their earnings to the development of ...

Article

Dorsey, Thomas Andrew  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Thomas A. Dorsey's name is synonymous with modern Gospel Music. Dorsey composed over 1,000 songs in his lifetime, half of which were published. With creative genius and business savvy, Dorsey popularized songs that combined the rhythm and tonality of Blues with lyrics about personal spiritual salvation. Countless gospel performers achieved their first success singing Dorsey's music. His most famous song, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” is one of the most popular gospel songs in America.

Dorsey was born to Etta and Thomas Madison Dorsey. Thomas Madison was an itinerant preacher, and Etta played the organ in church. As a child, Dorsey was regularly exposed to spirituals and Baptist hymns. Extended family members introduced Dorsey to rural blues and shaped-note singing. In 1908 the family moved to Atlanta, where Dorsey learned to play the piano by watching pianists at a vaudeville theater on Decatur Street. Dorsey also saw Ma ...

Article

Dorsey, Thomas Andrew  

Kip Lornell

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

blues performer, gospel singer, and composer, was born in Villa Rica, Georgia, the son of Thomas Madison Dorsey, a preacher, and Etta Plant Spencer. Dorsey's mother, whose first husband had died, owned approximately fifty acres of farmland. Dorsey lived in somewhat trying circumstances as his parents moved first to Atlanta and Forsyth, Georgia, and then back to Villa Rica during the first four years of his life. In Villa Rica the Dorsey family settled into a rural lifestyle supported by marginal farming that was slightly mitigated by his father's pastoral duties.

Though economically pressed Dorsey s parents found enough money to purchase an organ and it was on this instrument that their young son began to play music at around six years of age Dorsey was exposed not only to the religious music that pervaded his home but also to the secular music especially the ...

Article

Dudley, Sherman H.  

Elton C. Fax

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Born in Texas, Sherman H. Dudley, like many Southern blacks who resented being addressed by their first names by whites, used only his initials in an effort to ward off the insult. In the tradition of most black performers of his day he worked the medicine-show circuit. Talented singers and dancers often began their professional careers as performers hired by itinerant street salesmen of patent medicines. The performances were designed to attract prospective buyers to the hucksters' medicinal wares. Most such entertainers of the South were blacks, many of them mere boys.

While still in his twenties, Dudley joined the McCabe and Young Minstrels, working as a comic end man who called himself Hapsy. He followed that stint by teaming with singer and dancer Dude Kelly and performing as a substitute for Sam Lucas at Broadway s Star Theater So successful was the pair of substitutes that they ...

Article

Dudley, Sherman Houston  

Kevin Byrne

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

vaudeville entertainer and theatrical entrepreneur, was born in Dallas, Texas. The names of his parents are unknown. Though in later interviews Dudley frequently changed the story of how he broke into show business, his earliest stage work was most likely in Texas and Louisiana as part of a medicine show. This job, in which he played music and told jokes to draw a crowd to the pitchman and his wares, was an appropriate beginning for a man who always sought to be the center of attention. Dudley eventually became an artist and businessman who, as demonstrated by both his actions and writings, was passionately concerned with cultivating the rights and strengthening the dignity of African American performers during an era when what it meant to be a black entertainer was greatly in flux.

Dudley s apprenticeship in the professional theatrical world took place during the last decade of the ...

Article

Needham, Theresa  

Mary Krane Derr

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
28 February 2013

blues bar owner and talent promoter, was born Theresa McLaurin in Meridian, Lauderdale County, Mississippi. She was the only child of Will and Minnie McLaurin, both natives of Mississippi. Needham's birth year is commonly given as 1912, but it was 1911 according to the Social Security Death Index. As a young girl, she was baptized as a Roman Catholic. The 1920 U.S. Census recorded her as living in Meridian with her uncle, aunt, and cousin. The 1930 Census noted her recent marriage to Robert Needham, then a bricklayer. They had a son together, Robert Needham Jr. Theresa Needham's educational history is unclear, but, according to this census report, she reached adulthood knowing how to read and write.

After World War II Needham and her family joined the large number of African Americans who migrated from the Mississippi River Delta to Chicago s South Side in search of ...

Article

Spikes, Reb  

Amy L. Lively

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
28 February 2013

musician and entrepreneur, was born Benjamin Franklin Spikes in Dallas, Texas, the youngest child of Madora and Monroe Spikes, the latter a barber. Spikes was nicknamed “Rebel,” later shortened to “Reb,” by his father. The family relocated to Los Angeles in 1897, and when Spikes was in his late teens his older brother, Johnny, bought him a drum set, sparking his interest in music.

In 1907, Spikes moved to San Francisco. Ragtime, a precursor to jazz, was frequently heard in local clubs and saloons and was an important influence on the music that Spikes would write, perform, and produce. As Spikes developed his musical skills, he and Johnny went on the road as performers. In approximately 1910, they formed a traveling vaudeville group called the Spikes Brothers Comedy Stars. A notable member of the troupe was Hattie McDaniel whose portrayal of Mammy in ...

Article

Ward, Gertrude Mae  

David Michel

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

gospel singer and group leader, was born Gertrude Willa Azalee Murphy near Anderson, South Carolina, the eleventh of twelve children born to David and Hannah Murphy, both being farmers and Baptists. Gertrude completed eighth grade and, like millions of African Americans, moved north. In 1920 she settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and married George Ward, with whom she had two daughters, Willa(rene) and Clara Mae, born in 1922 and 1924 respectively. In Philadelphia, Gertrude did domestic work while her husband joined an iron company, where he remained for forty-two years. The Ward family soon joined Ebenezer Baptist Church at Tenth Street and Girard Avenue and would remain active there for years. Both Ward and her husband joined the senior choir. In 1931 Ward claimed to hear the voice of God telling her, “Go sing my Gospel.”

Ward aggressively pursued a singing ministry She familiarized herself with gospel ...