Up & Coming Weekly

Lena Horne: Musician and Trailblazer by TOM HENNESSY When Lena Horne passed away recently, many people’s first reaction was Lena who? That tends to happen when you’ve reached the age of 92 and have been out of the public eye for over a decade. Still, many of those people have heard her voice on the sound tracks of movies and television shows in the 21st cen- tury including Six Feet Under, Take the Lead, Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights and Johnny Mercer: the Dream’s on Me. Her passing led to a revival of her shows and films including Stormy Weather and Lena Horne: In Her Own Words. All of this helps us to remember how great a performer and how much of a trailblazer she was. Lena Horne opened doors for minor- ity performers and entertained along the way. When Horne was born in 1917 in Brooklyn, Ma Rainey was touring tent shows and the Whitman Sisters were touring vaudeville, but African-American women were not represented in the mechanical media. By the time Horne joined the chorus of the Harlem’s Cotton Club in 1933, Bessie Smith and the other classic blues singers had carved out a black recording market which was ending with the Depression. When Horne went to Hollywood in 1938 to make The Duke is Tops an independent all-black musical, she was basically alone. Once she made it, the film was re-released as The Bronze Venus and Horne was top-billed. By 1938, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Maxine Sullivan and others had shown that black women could be successful in nightclubs and on swing records. Horne returned to New York to pursue this direction. She records briefly with Charlie Barnet, Artie Shaw and Teddy Wilson. Though a fine cabaret perform- er, Horne was not really a swing or jazz vocalist at this time. A nightclub booking in Los Angeles, her photogenic looks, and the sup- port of the NAACP got Hollywood’s attention. Early in World War II, Horne signed an MGM contract but the studio wasn’t sure what to do with her. She sang two songs in the 1942 Ann Southern-Red Skelton comedy with musician Panama Hattie. The two songs were stand alone numbers that could be cut out by theaters that did not want to show a black singer as an equal to whites. Horne was not credited in the original release. Her light skin and the Panama setting confused some audiences into thinking she was Hispanic. She was only given meaty roles in two all black musicals, both in 1943 during World War II. In Cabin In the Sky, she played the bad girl who loses Eddie “Rochester” Anderson to his good woman wife, Ethel Waters. Waters also got the best songs. In Stormy Weather, Horne was the female star. She got to sing the title song which had been Ethel Waters’s signature tune for a decade. As Ethel moved into character acting and singing for Billy Graham, Stormy Weather became Horne’s song. She continued to face storms in Hollywood and basically left film after 1950. She left the attempt to open up Hollywood to Dorothy Dandridge, who also failed. That fight would not really be won until the 1970s. Horne returned to nightclubs. She was one of the earliest black performers in Las Vegas. She was also one of the many black performers on TV variety shows in the 1950s and 1960s. These shows were basically the only place besides sports where African-American achievement could be seen on television before 1965. It took Bill Cosby in I Spy [1965] and Diahann Carroll in Julia {1968] to really open up series television to African-American actors. Carroll had begun her career in Hollywood as Horne was leaving. Carroll worked in sup- porting roles to Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones [1954} and Porgy and Bess [1959}. She had done TV variety shows as a singer like Horne in the 1950s-1960s. She did some TV and movie acting before 1968. Horne spent much of the 1960s being active in the Civil Rights Movement. She continued to do concerts and TV variety shows into the 1970s. She played Glinda the Good Witch to Diana Ross’s Dorothy and Michael Jackson’s Scarecrow in The Wiz. [1978} She did a series of benefit concerts for Delta Sigma Theta in 1980. In 1981, she opened Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music on Broadway. She continued the show through the Broadway run, US national tour, and international tour until it ended in September 1984. Lena cut back on live performances and did some record- ing in the late 1980s and 1990s. She retired from public life in the late 1990s. Still her legacy has been assured. Her accomplishments remain as the basis for so many others to build on. TOM HENNESSY, Contributing Writer COMMENTS? 484-6200 ext. 222 or editor@upandcomingweekly.com 18 UCW JULY 7-13, 2010 CHARLIE MIKE’S PUB 195 Star Point Road • 826-6453 Tues. 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