One of jazz’s pioneers, Lena Horne, died this week at the age of 92. She wasn’t a pioneer because of innovative style, a powerful voice, or groundbreaking technique. Rather, she was a breaker of stereotypes, one of the first black cinematic sex symbols, a fighter for civil rights, and a role model to millions. But just because of her personal struggles and heroic actions, her music shouldn’t be discounted.
Horne was born a light-skinned black into a middle class Brooklyn family.
At 16 she began dancing at the famous Cotton Club in Harlem. The Cotton Club was a swanky night club which was managed by mafia groups, catered to rich white clients, denied admission to blacks as clients, but had some of the biggest names in jazz come perform including, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Billie Holiday.
The Cotton Club became a symbol of mob wars, the rise of jazz, and also of the race situation in America. Only light skinned black girls were allowed to be dancers. The music was called ‘jungle music’ with actors performing voodoo dances and acting as savages in front of the all white audience.
In the mid 1930’s she was the principal vocalist with the all-black Noble Sissle Society Orchestra, marrying at 19, having two children, and divorcing after a few years.
In 1941 she began singing at the Trocadero club in Hollywood. It was there she was discovered by movie scouts. But blacks weren’t allowed to live in Hollywood. Her neighbours began to pressure her to leave and she was only allowed to stay after famous actor Humphrey Bogart intervened.
MGM signed her to a seven year contract.
She was cast in two films. “Stormy Weather,” was a musical with very little plot but a lot of music. The song went on to become famous, and Horne with it. The second film, “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by Vincente Minnelli, she played a risqué temptress. A scene of her singing in the bath was removed by censors as too sexual.
She was the highest earning black performer with sometimes $10,000 a week. But in her films she never interacted with white actors, and her roels in films were often edited out for southern cinemas.
Horne became popular with US soldiers during the war. But the Army later shunned her performances because she criticized how black soldiers were treated.
Once returning from a performance, for white soldiers in a large auditorium at Fort Riley, Kan., she returned to entertain black troops in the black mess hall. But when she discovered that the whites seated in the front rows were German prisoners of war, she became furious. Marching off the platform, she turned her back on the POWs and sang to the black soldiers in the back of the hall.
"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," Horne once said. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."
In 1947 she married a white band arranger. The pressure on them was so great, they kept the marriage secret for three years and moved to Paris.
In the early 1960s Ms. Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches and protests. She stayed active both in speaking out as well as music. She continued Broadway shows and recording into her eighties.
Her voice has been described as, ‘honey and bourbon’. Her sultry and smooth voice made her the sex symbol for US soldiers and jazz fans. It also added her to the list of jazz divas of the era.
But Lena Horne’s friendship with Billy Strayhorn, the man Duke Ellington described as, “"my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine", is what defined her own style. He guided her singing technique pushing her from cinema symbol to jazz stylist. Horne claimed Staryhorn was the only man she ever loved, but because he was openly gay, their romance never began.
Horne was a pioneer in bringing black entertainers into the mainstream, like Miles Davis and Dexter Gordon, she was an exile from her country to Europe to escape discrimination, and she was a heroic soul and grand voice which will be missed.
