Lena Horne

Lena Horne dedicated the bulk of her professional efforts to nightclub performances, a vocation she carried out with global success across more than six decades beginning in the 1930s and extending into the 1990s. Parallel to those stage appearances, she sustained a recording output that ran from 1936 until 2000 and brought her three Grammy Awards, one of which was the Lifetime Achievement honor presented in 1989; between 1938 and 1978 she took part in 16 feature films plus several short subjects; she appeared on Broadway from time to time, most notably headlining her own Tony-winning solo production Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music during the 1981–1982 seasons; and she contributed singing and acting work to both radio and television broadcasts. Compounding the demands of such an extensive career was the reality of being an African-American performer who confronted personal and professional discrimination amid sweeping social transformations in the United States. Her initial employment in the 1930s took place at the Cotton Club, an establishment where Black artists could appear onstage yet were barred from entering as patrons; by the time she performed in the 1969 motion picture Death of a Gunfighter, the screenplay treated her character’s marriage to a white man without any narrative comment. Horne herself stood at the center of shifting racial perceptions throughout the twentieth century; her middle-class background and formal musical preparation steered her toward the popular repertoire of her era rather than the blues and jazz idioms more typically linked to African-American musicians, while her appearance was sufficiently close to Caucasian features that she was repeatedly urged to “pass” as white, an option she consistently declined. That same intermediate position within a larger social conflict positioned her to assume a leading role in the struggle, publicly advocating racial integration and raising funds for Civil Rights initiatives. Looking back at the close of the century, she could reflect on a life marked by persistent friction yet ultimately defined by achievement.

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne entered the world on June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, one of New York City’s boroughs. Lineage on both sides combined African-American, Native American, and Caucasian ancestry, placing the family among the group W.E.B. DuBois labeled “the talented tenth,” the educated middle-class segment of the Black population. Nevertheless, her parents each deviated from that conventional path. Her father, Edwin Fletcher Horne, Jr., held a position with the New York State Department of Labor, though one biographer more precisely characterized him as “a ‘numbers’ banker,” his actual livelihood deriving from gambling. Her mother, Edna Louise (Scottron) Horne, harbored ambitions to perform. The couple resided in a Brooklyn brownstone alongside Horne’s paternal grandparents, educator and newspaper editor Edwin Fletcher Horne, Sr., and his wife Cora (Calhoun) Horne, a Civil Rights activist and founding participant in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the organization established in 1909 and directed by DuBois. Horne herself maintained an early connection to the group; a photograph of her at age two appeared on the cover of the October 1919 issue of the NAACP’s Branch Bulletin, identified as its youngest member.

Horne’s parents ended their marriage in August 1920, when she was three, and later divorced. Her father relocated first to Seattle and eventually to Pittsburgh, where he managed a hotel between travels to sporting events across the country for gambling purposes. Horne and her mother initially stayed with the grandparents in Brooklyn, but around age five the mother departed to chase an acting career, beginning with the Lafayette Stock Company in Harlem. In her 1965 autobiography Lena, written with Richard Schickel, Horne remembered occasional visits to her mother and an early stage appearance as a child in the Philadelphia production of Madame X. After several years the mother brought Horne along on tour, so that between roughly ages six and eleven the girl lived in various Southern and Midwestern locations under the care of relatives and hired companions, punctuated by returns to Brooklyn. By early 1929 she settled permanently once more with her grandparents. She remained there until September 1932, when her grandmother passed away, after which she moved in with a family acquaintance. While enrolled at Girls High School in Brooklyn she also studied dance and performed for a week in 1933 with a group at the Harlem Opera House. Her mother, having remarried in Cuba, returned to New York and reclaimed her daughter. They first lived in Brooklyn, then the Bronx, and later Harlem. Amid the economic pressures of the Depression, the mother secured an audition for Horne at the Cotton Club through a contact; at sixteen she was engaged as a chorus girl.

Horne gained notice outside the chorus line when she substituted for an ailing performer in a rendition of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s “As Long As I Live” alongside Avon Long. Shortly afterward she performed “Cocktails for Two” with Claude Hopkins & His Orchestra during a theater engagement with the Cotton Club troupe and began vocal lessons. A theatrical producer who saw her at the club offered a minor role in the play Dance with Your Gods, which opened briefly on October 6, 1934, marking her Broadway debut. In 1935 she departed the Cotton Club to sing with Noble Sissle & His Orchestra under the billing Helena Horne. Her first recordings, made with Sissle on March 11, 1936, were “That’s What Love Did to Me” and “I Take to You,” both issued by Decca Records.

Through her father she met Louis Jordan Jones, a Pittsburgh political figure. In January 1937 she stepped away from entertainment to wed him; their daughter Gail arrived on December 21 of that year. Jones held a clerk position in the county coroner’s office secured through patronage, yet it yielded limited income. When an agent approached Horne in 1938 with an offer to co-star in a modest all-Black film musical requiring only ten days of shooting in Hollywood, she accepted. The resulting picture, The Duke Is Tops, reached theaters in July 1938. Later that year she undertook a more demanding assignment, a role in producer Lew Leslie’s revived all-Black revue Blackbirds. She again consented to bolster family finances, spending months in rehearsals and tryouts before Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds opened on Broadway on February 11, 1939. One of her numbers, “You’re So Indifferent” by Sammy Fain and Mitchell Parish, remained in her repertoire thereafter. The production closed after nine performances on February 18.

Horne returned to Pittsburgh, temporarily separated from her husband, then reconciled. She accepted singing engagements in the homes of affluent local families and soon became pregnant again; her son Edwin Fletcher (“Teddy”) Jones was born in February 1940. That autumn she made a permanent break from her husband, formal divorce following in June 1944, and moved to New York to resume her career. In December she joined the orchestra of white bandleader Charlie Barnet, an uncommon instance of integration within swing ensembles at the time. Several recordings made with Barnet in January 1941 appeared on RCA Victor’s Bluebird label. After only a few months, however, the hardships of racial prejudice encountered on tour, combined with her wish for a stable home in which to raise her children (Jones allowed her custody of their daughter but kept their son), prompted her to seek New York employment. In March 1941 she began performing at Café Society Downtown in Greenwich Village, again credited as Helena Horne. She also undertook radio work, becoming a regular on NBC’s Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street series. In June 1941 she served as featured vocalist on recordings by Henry Levine & the Dixieland Jazz Group for RCA, cutting W.C. Handy material for the 78-rpm album The Birth of the Blues. Additional sessions followed with Artie Shaw and with Teddy Wilson, her accompanist at Café Society.

After six months Horne left her New York engagement upon receiving an offer to help launch a Los Angeles club. She reached the West Coast in September 1941 only to discover the venue unready; after Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II and building materials grew scarce, opening was indefinitely postponed. In the interim she secured a direct contract with RCA and in December 1941 recorded eight tracks with an orchestra led by Lou Bring for her debut solo album, Moanin’ Low. The collection included numbers she would perform throughout her career, among them a revival of the 1933 Cotton Club tune “Stormy Weather” by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler and the 1928 Gershwin standard “The Man I Love.” Abandoning plans for a large establishment (originally envisioned as The Trocadero), her sponsor instead opened the smaller Little Troc in February 1942 with Horne as headliner. Immediate attention from the film community led to studio offers, and she ultimately signed with MGM. She nevertheless insisted that an NAACP representative review her contract to ensure she would not be compelled into the stereotypical roles frequently assigned to African-American performers. In practice, MGM provided little else; in eleven of the thirteen features she appeared in over the next fourteen years she merely performed a song or two without speaking parts. Those “specialty” sequences were later compiled for the 1996 Turner/Rhino release Lena Horne at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Ain’t It the Truth. Her first such appearance occurred almost immediately; by May 1942 she was pre-recording songs, including the standard “Just One of Those Things,” for the Cole Porter musical adaptation Panama Hattie while simultaneously continuing nightclub work, moving from the Little Troc to the Mocambo.

Horne received no screen credit in Panama Hattie, and the film’s Latin American setting may have been intended to present her as Hispanic rather than Black. Her subsequent picture dispelled any such ambiguity: a screen version of the all-Black musical Cabin in the Sky, in which she both sang and acted opposite Ethel Waters and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. She completed shooting in late summer 1942, then returned to New York for an engagement at the Café Lounge of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel beginning November 26. National coverage in outlets such as Time and Life accelerated her rising profile. By March 1943 she was back in Hollywood for her most intensive period of film work. MGM loaned her to 20th Century-Fox for another all-Black musical, the fictionalized biography of dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson titled Stormy Weather, in which she co-starred with Robinson and again performed the title song that became her signature. Cabin in the Sky opened in April while she was touring Black theaters including Washington, D.C.’s Howard and Harlem’s Apollo. Returning to MGM, she quickly filmed musical sequences for successive pictures: Swing Fever (featuring “You’re So Indifferent”), Thousands Cheer (“Honeysuckle Rose” by Fats Waller and Andy Razaf), I Dood It (“Jericho”), and Broadway Rhythm (the 1924 Gershwin standard “Somebody Loves Me”). Prints shown in the South routinely omitted her scenes to avoid offending racist audiences. Stormy Weather premiered, and with I Dood It and Thousands Cheer already released by year’s end, Broadway Rhythm and Swing Fever followed in early 1944 while Two Girls and a Sailor (containing her rendition of the Mills Brothers hit “Paper Doll”) arrived in April, giving her appearances in seven major musicals within little more than twelve months. She would never again be so active on screen, completing only seven additional films over the remainder of her career.

When studio assignments slowed, Horne stayed occupied elsewhere. She entertained troops at military bases, appeared on radio programs including the African-American-oriented military series Jubilee and the drama Suspense, maintained club and theater bookings, and, once the musicians’ union recording ban imposed in 1942 was lifted, cut several sides in November 1944 with Horace Henderson & His Orchestra, among them her longtime staple “As Long as I Live.” (Bluebird later reissued those and earlier tracks on the 2002 CD The Young Star, incorporating additional material purportedly recorded in January 1944 while the ban remained in effect.) At MGM her sole contribution that period was to the anthology Ziegfeld Follies, where she sang and performed the newly written Ralph Blane–Hugh Martin number “Love.” The film finally reached theaters in January 1946. By then she was working on Til the Clouds Roll By, a biography of Jerome Kern, recording and filming a sequence that placed her onstage in Show Boat as Julie LaVerne, the light-skinned character attempting to pass for white who sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Bill.” (Her performance of “Bill” was excised from the release print but later included on Lena Horne at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Ain’t It the Truth.)

Horne ended her association with RCA in 1946 and recorded that autumn for the small Black & White label. When Til the Clouds Roll By opened in November, MGM seized the moment to inaugurate its own record company and issue the first original-motion-picture-soundtrack album. Featuring Judy Garland, June Allyson, and Tony Martin alongside Horne, the Til the Clouds Roll By soundtrack climbed to number three in spring 1947, establishing MGM Records as her new home. Freed once more from studio obligations, she traveled to England that spring to perform at the London Casino. She returned to Europe in October 1947 for an extended stay that included engagements in England, France, and Belgium. The trip served an additional purpose: she had entered a serious relationship with MGM arranger and conductor Lennie Hayton, yet because Hayton was white the couple could not marry in California, where interracial unions were prohibited. They wed instead in Paris in December 1947 and kept the marriage secret for two and a half years.

As customary, Horne had only one film assignment in 1948, appearing in Words and Music, a biography of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, where she performed “Where or When” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” Released in December, the picture generated a soundtrack album that featured Garland, Allyson, and Mickey Rooney in addition to Horne and reached number one for six weeks beginning February 12, 1949. Five days later she recorded “Baby, Come Out of the Clouds” for her final specialty appearance under her seven-year MGM contract, the Esther Williams vehicle Duchess of Idaho. With the film’s June 1950 release, her career entered a new phase. Free of her movie commitment, she sailed to Europe for an extended tour that month; simultaneously she disclosed her marriage to Hayton and learned that her name had been listed in Red Channels, a publication identifying performers deemed Communists or Communist sympathizers. Although she was not labeled a Communist herself, her inclusion stemmed from associations, notably with Paul Robeson, and from assistance she had given various liberal Hollywood organizations in the 1940s, chiefly in connection with Civil Rights efforts. The listing nevertheless inflicted substantial professional harm. No further film contracts materialized, she lacked a recording deal, and offers for radio or the new medium of television ceased. Live performances remained her principal outlet, and she worked increasingly in Europe over the following years. Returning to the United States in September 1950, she opened for the first time at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in December, an annual engagement she would maintain for the next decade. Additional European tours occurred in 1952 and 1954.

Eventually Horne secured clearance from the blacklist, reopening opportunities in American media. At the close of 1954 she re-signed with RCA and returned to the studio in March 1955 to record a revival of Ruth Etting’s 1928 hit “Love Me or Leave Me,” timed to coincide with the Etting film biography of the same name. The single became her first chart success, reaching number 19 on the Billboard chart in July. RCA promptly issued the full-length album It’s Love. She began appearing on television variety programs and received an invitation back to MGM for a role in Meet Me in Las Vegas, again limited to singing one number. The picture opened in winter 1956; that same year she released additional RCA sides, toured Europe once more, and, beginning New Year’s Eve, commenced a lengthy run at the Empire Room of New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. RCA captured a performance on February 20, 1957, yielding the live album Lena Horne at the Waldorf Astoria, issued that summer. It reached the Billboard Top 25, the Cash Box Top Ten, and was reported as the best-selling album by a female artist on RCA to that date.

Horne moved her show to the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood in June, where she recorded the live EP Lena Horne at the Cocoanut Grove and announced a temporary withdrawal from nightclub work to prepare for a Broadway musical. The production was Jamaica, with songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg; originally conceived for Harry Belafonte, who proved unavailable, the creators revised the book to strengthen the part of the male lead’s girlfriend for Horne. Although critics found the show itself unremarkable when it opened on October 31, 1957, they praised Horne, who sustained a run of 558 performances lasting until April 11, 1959. While based in New York she issued numerous new RCA recordings, including the album Stormy Weather, the Jamaica cast album, the Top 20 hit Give the Lady What She Wants (fall 1958), a duet collection with Belafonte drawn from Porgy and Bess timed to a film version of the Gershwin opera in 1959, and Songs by Burke and Van Heusen. She disliked the Porgy and Bess LP and attempted to block its release through legal action, yet once issued it reached the Billboard Top 15 and Cash Box Top Ten, earning her first Grammy nomination for Best Vocal Performance, Female, though Ella Fitzgerald ultimately prevailed.

After completing her Broadway commitment, Horne resumed nightclub work in 1959, performing in Europe that summer and fall before returning to the Sands in Las Vegas. Her schedule followed a similar pattern in 1960. That November RCA again recorded her in concert, resulting in the 1961 release Lena at the Sands, which brought another Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal Performance, Female, again lost to Judy Garland, whose Judy at Carnegie Hall also captured Album of the Year. Horne next developed a stage revue, Lena Horne in Her Nine O’Clock Revue, intended for Broadway but which closed during tryouts in Toronto and New Haven. She continued recording for RCA, charting with Lena on the Blue Side in April 1962 and Lena…Lovely and Alive in February 1963 (the latter earning a third Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal Performance, Female, again lost to Ella Fitzgerald). Declining sales ended the contract. She moved to Charter Records and completed two albums, Lena Sings Your Requests and Goes Latin (later reissued by DRG as the two-fer Lena Goes Latin & Sings Your Requests), yet growing involvement in the early-1960s Civil Rights movement (including an appearance with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, shortly before his assassination on June 12, 1963, and participation in the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on August 28) prompted her to reassess her role as an entertainer. An article she wrote for Show magazine titled “I Just Want to Be Myself” inspired colleagues to supply her with more politically charged material. Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg contributed “Silent Spring,” which borrowed its title from Rachel Carson’s environmental book while addressing wider social issues, and Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green supplied the Civil Rights-themed “Now!” set to the melody of “Hava Na Gila.” Horne introduced both numbers at a Carnegie Hall benefit for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where they were heard by a producer from 20th Century Fox Records who offered her a new contract. A single coupling “Now!” and “Silent Spring