Search Results

Sign in Modify your search

Narrow Your Choices

Format

Type

Articles containing

Life event

Date

Subject

Occupation

Era

Availability

 1-7 of 7 Results  for:

  • African American Studies x
  • 1866–1876: Reconstruction x
  • Nightclub Entertainer x
  • Performing Arts x
Clear all

Article

Baker, LaVern  

Barry Marshall

Article

Publication History:

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

singer, was born in Chicago as Delores Williams. Nothing is known about her parents. Raised by her aunt, Merline Baker, also known as the blues singer Memphis Minnie, Baker started singing almost as soon as she could walk, both in her Baptist church and in the street. She grew up in poverty and sang for change on the downtown Chicago streets from the age of three. She started singing professionally as a teenager at the Club Delisa, decked out in down-home clothes and billed as “Little Miss Sharecropper.” The “Sharecropper” sobriquet was a takeoff on the popular blues shouter “Little Miss Cornshucks,” and although it garnered her attention at the time, she was embarrassed by it later in her life. She also appeared at different venues as Bea Baker.

At the age of seventeen, Baker moved to Detroit. By 1947 she was appearing regularly at ...

Article

Donegan, Dorothy  

Linda Dahl

Article

Publication History:

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

jazz pianist and entertainer, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the older of two children (she had a brother, Leone), of Donazell Donegan and Ella Day Donegan. Donegan's father was a cook on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, and her mother supplemented the family income by letting out rooms. Dorothy's musical virtuosity revealed itself when she was eight, when she began playing a-neighbor's piano for the first time. Recognizing her-daughter's talent, her mother arranged for piano lessons and soon Donegan was playing at local churches and, by the time she was fourteen, for tips in local South Side spots. She continued formal music studies at DuSable High School with Walter Henri Dyett, who taught other future notables, including the singer Dinah Washington and the saxophonist Johnny Griffin.

In 1939 at age seventeen Donegan was booked to play at Costello s Grill a downtown club hitherto reserved ...

Article

Hughes, Revella  

Gayle Murchison

Article

Publication History:

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

musician, singer, and educator, was born Ravella Eudosia Hughes in Huntington, West Virginia, the daughter of George W. Hughes, a postman, and Annie B. (maiden name unknown), a piano teacher and seamstress. At age five Hughes began studying piano with her mother and, at eight or nine, violin with a musician friend of her father's. She attended Huntington's segregated public schools. Disturbed when she was racially harassed, her parents sent her to Hartshorn Memorial College (later part of Virginia Union University) in Richmond, which she attended from 1909 to 1911, graduating with a degree in music and elementary studies. She attended Oberlin High and Conservatory, graduating in 1915. In 1917 she earned a bachelor of music in Piano from Howard's Conservatory of Music, where she studied piano with LeRoy Tibbs and voice with the conservatory director Lulu Vere Childers Hughes then taught violin ...

Article

McNair, Barbara  

Sharon D. Johnson

Article

Publication History:

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

singer, nightclub entertainer, and actress, was born Barbara Joan McNair in Chicago, Illinois, and raised from the age of three in Racine, Wisconsin. McNair's father, a foundry worker, and her mother, a housekeeper at an institution for mentally disabled children, recognized her vocal musical gifts early on. After discussions with McNair's teachers, her parents decided that she should receive formal training in music. McNair went on to study at the Racine Conservatory of Music and Chicago's American Conservatory of Music, and later majored in music at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied for one year before deciding to move to New York City in the early 1950s.

Once she arrived in New York McNair secured a secretarial job at the National Federation of Settlements to support herself while she went to open auditions at various nightclubs in the city Even after she was hired ...

Article

Miles, Lizzie  

Barry Kernfeld

Article

Publication History:

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

blues singer, was born Elizabeth Mary Landreaux Miles in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of J.-C. Miles, whose occupation is unknown. Her mother was a singer, whose name is unknown (Landreaux, presumably). Lizzie's stepbrothers were the trumpeter Herb Morand, who at some point during the 1920s played in New York in a band accompanying Lizzie, and the drummer Maurice Morand. Lizzie first sang in church at age five. She also sang in school before dropping out to perform at parties and dances. From 1909 to 1911 she sang with the cornetist King Oliver, the trombonist Kid Ory, the trumpeter Bunk Johnson, and the violinist Armand John Piron at numerous venues in New Orleans. Around this time she married; no other details are known. Her second marriage was to August Pajaud; again, details are unknown.

Miles toured southern theaters as a member ...

Article

Millinder, Lucky  

Barry Kernfeld

Article

Publication History:

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

bandleader and composer, was born Lucius Venable Millinder in Anniston, Alabama. The identity and circumstances of his parents are unknown. He was raised in Chicago, Illinois, where he attended Wendell Phillips High School.

As Lucius Venable he began to work as a master of ceremonies and danced in nightclubs, including one run by Al Capone's brother Ralph in Cicero, Illinois. He became a bandleader in 1931, touring the RKO theater circuit. Early in 1932 he took over the little-known Doc Crawford band, and later that year he moved to New York.

Millinder appeared in the film short Scandals of 1933. In 1933 the promoter Irving Mills began grooming Millinder to take over the Mills Blue Rhythm Band by making him the frontman for the Congo Knights, a ten-piece band. Millinder and the band members worked locally and then played on the French Riviera from July to October ...

Article

Short, Bobby  

David Borsvold

Article

Publication History:

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

cabaret singer and pianist, was born Robert Waltrip Short in Danville, Illinois, the ninth of ten children of Rodman Jacob Short, a civil servant, and Myrtle Render. Although he was born into poverty, four-year-old Bobby had a few piano lessons, but he essentially taught himself on the household instrument. Before age ten, Short was playing the piano for money in nearby roadhouses. Soon afterward he began to perform sophisticated ballads at private parties while wearing white tails in the manner of Cab Calloway. During the Depression, Short's father, who had become a coal miner out of necessity, died in an accident. In 1936 eleven year old Bobby was spotted by booking agents who offered him ice cream and candy to go on the road With his mother s blessing he traveled to Chicago Marketed as the Miniature King of Swing he sang and played the ...