Biography
Ada Brown supplied the vocals on "Evil Mama Blues," the earliest documented Kansas City jazz recording, cut with the Bennie Moten band, yet she belonged to the classic blues lineage rather than the stockyard city's storied "blues shouters." Singers of her tradition often possessed formal preparation and technical command sufficient for the legitimate stage, and Brown began exercising those abilities in the 1930s, already her second decade as a professional. Raised in a Kansas City, Kansas household that nurtured musical invention, she counted the distinguished ragtime composer and pianist James Scott among her cousins. Before her early-1920s association with Moten, she had completed numerous domestic and overseas engagements, several of them alongside the pioneering recording artist George E. Lee.
Vaudeville remained her principal outlet through most of the 1920s, though wider avenues opened the following decade. A charter member of the Negro Actors Guild of America founded in 1936, Brown played the London Palladium in the late 1930s and appeared in multiple Broadway productions in New York City. She shared the 1943 film Stormy Weather with Fats Waller, then took a role in the successful revue Harlem to Hollywood; pianist Harry Swannagan supplied her accompaniment for the greater part of these undertakings. In the mid-1940s, however, Brown returned to her native city and withdrew from public performance.
Vaudeville remained her principal outlet through most of the 1920s, though wider avenues opened the following decade. A charter member of the Negro Actors Guild of America founded in 1936, Brown played the London Palladium in the late 1930s and appeared in multiple Broadway productions in New York City. She shared the 1943 film Stormy Weather with Fats Waller, then took a role in the successful revue Harlem to Hollywood; pianist Harry Swannagan supplied her accompaniment for the greater part of these undertakings. In the mid-1940s, however, Brown returned to her native city and withdrew from public performance.