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MUSIC
Billie Holiday Singer, jazz vocalist. Born Eleanora Fagan on
April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Some sources say
Baltimore, Maryland. Her
birth certificate reportedly reads Elinore Harris.) One of the
most influential jazz singers of all time, Billie Holiday had a
thriving career for many years before her battles with substance
abuse got the better of her.
Holiday spent much of her child-hood in Baltimore, Maryland. Her
mother, Sadie, was only a teenager when she had her. Her father is
widely believed to be Clarence Holiday, who eventually became a
successful jazz mu-sician, playing with the likes of Fletcher
Henderson. Unfortunately for Billie, he was only an infrequent
visitor in her life growing up. Sadie married Philip Gough in 1920
and for a few years Billie had a somewhat stable home life. But
that marriage ended a few years later, leav-ing Billie and Sadie to
struggle along on their own again. Sometimes Billie was left in the
care of other people.
Holiday started skipping school,
and she and her mother went to court over Holidays truancy. She
was then sent to the House of Good Shepherd, a facility for
troubled African American girls, in January 1925. Only 9 years old
at the time, Holiday was one of the youngest girls there. She was
returned to her mothers care in August of that year. According to
Donald Clarkes biography, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, she
returned there in 1926 after she had been sexually assaulted.
In her difficult early life, Holiday found solace in music,
singing along to the records of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong.
She followed her mother who had moved to New York City in the late
1920s and worked in a house of prostitution in Harlem for a time.
Around 1930, Holiday began singing in local clubs and renamed
herself Billie after the film star Billie Dove.
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THEATER
Paul Robeson The son of a former slave turned preacher, Robeson
attended Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., where he was an
All-America football player. Upon graduating from Rutgers at the
head of his class, he rejected a career as a professional athlete
and instead entered Columbia University. He obtained a law degree
in 1923, but, because of the lack of opportunity for blacks in the
legal profession, he drifted to the stage, making a London debut in
1922. He joined the Provincetown Players, a New York theatre group
that included playwright Eugene ONeill, and appeared in ONeills
play All Gods Chillun Got Wings in 1924. His subsequent appearance
in the title role of ONeills The Emperor Jones caused a sensation
in New York City (1924) and London (1925). He also starred in the
film version of the play (1933). In addition to his other talents,
Robeson had a superb bass-baritone singing voice. In 1925 he gave
his first vocal recital of African American spirituals in Greenwich
Village, New York City, and he became world famous as Joe in the
musical play Show Boat with his version of Ol Man River. His
charac-terization of the title role in Othello in London (1930) won
high praise, as did the Broadway production (1943), which set an
all-time record run for a Shakespearean play on Broadway.
Increasing political awareness impelled Robeson to visit the
Soviet Union in 1934, and from that year he became increasingly
identified with strong left-wing commitments, while continuing his
success in concerts, recordings, and theatre. In 1950 the U.S.
State Department withdrew his passport because he refused to sign
an affidavit disclaiming membership in the Communist Party. In the
following years he was virtually ostracized for his political
views, although in 1958 the Supreme Court overturned the affida-vit
ruling. Robeson then left the United States to live in Europe and
travel in countries of the Soviet bloc, but he returned to the
United States in 1963 because of ill health.
Robeson appeared in a number of films, including Sanders of the
River (1935), Show Boat (1936), Song of Freedom (1936), and The
Proud Valley (1940). His autobiography, Here I Stand, was published
in 1958.
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LITERATURE
Langston HughesPoet, writer, playwright. Born Febru-
ary 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. After publishing his first
poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921), he attended Columbia
University (1921), but left after one year to work on a freighter,
travelling to Africa, living in Paris and Rome, and supporting
himself with odd jobs. After his poetry was promoted by Vachel
Linday, he attended Lincoln University (19259), and while there his
first book of poems, The Weary Blues (1926), launched his career as
a writer.
As one of the founders of the cul-tural movement known as the
Har-lem Renaissance, which he practically defined in his essay, The
Negro Artist and the Radical Mountain (1926), he was innovative in
his use of jazz rhythms and dialect to depict the life of urban
blacks in his poetry, stories, and plays. Having provided the
lyrics for the musi-cal Street Scene (1947) and the play that
inspired the opera Troubled Island
(1949), in the 1960s he returned to the stage with works that
drew on black gospel music, such as Black Nativity (1961).
A prolific writer for four decades, he abandoned the Marxism of
his youth, but never gave up protesting the injustices committed
against his fellow African Americans. Among his most popular
creations was Jesse B Semple, better known as Simple,a black
Every-man featured in the syndicated column he began in 1942 for
the Chicago Defender.
In his later years, Hughes completed a two-volume autobiography
and edited anthologies and pictorial volumes. Be-cause he often
employed humour and seldom portrayed or endorsed violent
confrontations, he was for some years disregarded as a model by
black writers, but by the 1980s he was being reap-praised and was
newly appreciated as a significant voice of African-Americans.
One of Langston Hughes most poignant poems is The Negro Speaks
of Rivers (1921). Click the icon to the left to hear it.
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