Adelaide Hall

Home , Adelaide Hall, Shuffle Along

Adelaide Hall - Transcript In 1984 Francis Ford Coppola released “The Cotton Club”, a film that depicts the legendary Harlem Jazz Club, where in the 1920s and 30s privileged white patrons would come to enjoy the very best jazz musicians of the day. Little did he know that one of the performers portrayed in the film was alive and well and living in London, but on the film’s release, she was rediscovered at the age of 83 and her career reignited.

The artist was not just a phenomenal jazz singer, she was a pioneer who had blazed a trail for other jazz artists to follow. Her name was Adelaide Hall. Adelaide’s story starts in the early 20C. Harlem was thriving. Known by white New Yorkers as “America’s Black Capital” the population was flourishing and the area enticed the young Arthur and Elizabeth Hall to move from volatile Brooklyn and settle in this clean, well maintained part of town. Arthur was a pianist. One of 13 children, his grandfather was a formerly enslaved African American from Long Island. Elizabeth boasted Pennsylvanian Dutch and North American Shinnecock Indian blood, of which the family was deeply proud. The couple’s eldest daughter Adelaide, had been born on 20 October 1901 and her younger sister Evelyn had followed 2 years later.

Music was in Adelaide’s veins and even as a small child singing came naturally to her. She was close to her father who would call her to his study so she could sing to him. “Sing to the moon Adie”, he would say “And the stars will shine”.

At school her enthusiastic music teacher Miss Corlias, counted future jazz pianist Fats Waller amongst her pupils. Adelaide learnt the ukulele and she and Fats played in the orchestra together. As teenagers Adelaide and Evelyn formed an act “The Hall Sisters”. Evelyn was on piano and Adelaide sang and they became familiar faces in the local venues. Adelaide’s childhood was happy and carefree, but it ended overnight in 1916 with the sudden death of her beloved father. With finances hit hard. Adelaide had to mature overnight.

Worse was to come 2 years later when at the age of only 16 Evelyn died from complications of pneumonia. Grief stricken Elizabeth and Adelaide now only had each other. At her grandmother’s insistence Adelaide attended evening classes to learn needlework and dressmaking and the intention was that Adelaide would become seamstress.

It was not to be however, as at a school concert Adelaide was spotted by the musical impresario Lew Leslie. He later likened her performance to that of a whirling dervish, but he was struck by her voice and foresaw a glittering career for her.

In 1921 Adelaide auditioned for a new all black musical and became one of the chorus. The musical called Shuffle Along opened on Broadway to acclaim and a recognition of African American culture which would lead to what became known as “The Harlem Renaissance”.

The show launched the careers, not just of Adelaide, but of Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson and others and became such a hit that it caused "curtain time traffic jams" on West 63rd Street.

1 It heralded the advent of Jazz. From nowhere black musicians would gather in small groups on street corners to improvise on whatever instruments they could lay their hands. New sounds and dance steps appeared, never witnessed by the white community before. On tour Shuffle Along became the first black musical to play in white theatres across the United States.

In 1923 Adelaide appeared in the musical “Running Wild”. It was the show that introduced the greatest dance craze the world had ever seen “The Charleston”, said to have originated on the cotton plantations. The show also introduced another icon of culture “The Flapper”. Adelaide was singled out in the show as “a real find!”. Heartthrob of the new talkies, Rudolph Valentino came to see the show. Fascinated by the new Charleston dance, Adelaide was sent to his hotel to teach it to him. The following day she received a beautifully packaged bottle of perfume as a thank you. In 1924 Adelaide fell in love and married Trinidadian born British sailor Bert Hicks. With little knowledge of the entertainment industry, he was an astute businessman. He appointed himself Adelaide’s business manager and opened a club in Harlem which Adelaide named “The Big Apple”. Whether or not she was the first person to coin the phrase, she certainly helped popularise the term. In 1925 Adelaide was employed as featured vocalist in a review, The Chocolate Kiddies. In one fell swoop this review was to introduce Harlem, the Charleston and real, live, black jazz to Europe. The production opened in the “cabaret city” of Berlin and the audiences went berserk. The high point of the show was during band leader Duke Ellington’s “Jig Walk” when Adelaide introduced the public to the Charleston. Whilst in Berlin she sang at the renowned transvestite club Eldorado, the venue immortalised in the 1972 film Cabaret.

Adelaide loved the exciting night life and liberated feel of Berlin. From there they toured Europe, but homesick for her family, Adelaide quit and returned to America a leading lady. Chocolate Kiddies had opened the floodgates for American black performers in Europe. Adelaide toured in a number of reviews and was by now established. These were the Prohibition years, but alcohol was readily available. She worked closely with Fats Waller and was partnered regularly with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the world’s leading tap dancer of the day. By now, Harlem was a glittering playground where white New Yorkers would flock after the Broadway Theatres had closed for the evening. Most establishments encouraged their patrons to drink bootleg alcohol, eat creole food and learn the latest dance crazes, but it’s prosperity went hand in hand with a seedier side of life - racketeers, vice barons and drug pedlars. Jazz was inextricably linked with the underworld. Black stars were in vogue. Not just music, but black literature, art and fashion were entering the mainstream.

However, Harlem’s smart supper clubs operated on a whites only door policy and would admit African Americans only as performers and waiters. The frustrated local black community were limited to the seedier joints around town.

2 In Desires of 1927 Adelaide performed the new dance craze, The Black Bottom which helped the dance achieve mass popularity and established her as one of the leading black female artists of America. In Chicago during a residency at the mob owned Sunset Cafe, Adelaide developed an friendship with band leader Louis Armstrong. He had recently been developing Scat, a style of wordless vocalising with which, by coincidence, Adelaide had been experimenting. She would later acknowledged how influential Armstrong had been on her. Back in NY, Adelaide was standing in the wings listening to Duke Ellington and his band, when she started to improvise scat to his new tune Creole Love Call. When he heard her Ellington excitedly led her out on stage to sing. The response was huge and two days later they recorded it together in the studio. On its release it attracted praise and outrage in equal measure due to its blatantly sexual overtones. Despite Adelaide indisputably writing the counter melody, her name was not credited as such on the record or the copyright, which has been a contentious issue ever since. It was the musical Blackbirds of 1928 which made Adelaide a star. Partnered with tap Bojangles, it was slated by the critics when it opened, but audiences were entranced by the charismatic leads and catchy tunes and it was a resounding success. With 518 performances it set a Broadway record for all black production which still stands to this day.

Adelaide was now attracting more attention than any other entertainer on stage at the time. She had top billing on the show and singlehandedly redefined the role of the black female in show business. Adelaide and Bojangles legs were insured for the sum of €500,000 dollars a pair!

One number in the show “Diga Diga Do” caused a sensation. In her steamy performance, Adelaide wore little more than tail feathers. When her mother attended the show she stormed out and rushed round to the dressing room in a rage. Only when promised that Adelaide’s costume would be modified and her hip wiggles limited would she be pacified. On one occasion a large party from the deep south attended and as the show commenced they hurled racist abuse at the cast. Pandemonium ensued, but in the end the perpetrators were handcuffed and marched off to the approval of the audience.

By now Adelaide had become a role model and someone with whom the black population could identify and emulate. She was a huge star and when Blackbirds was taken to Paris to the Moulin Rouge, the reception they gave Adelaide was verging on hysteria, reminiscent of the greeting comedian Charlie Chaplin had received 2 years earlier. As Adelaide approached the Moulin Rouge she looked up to see her partially naked image 4 stories high with legs astride the entrance. She was speechless and Bert was enraged that customers were walking in and out between his wife’s legs. But this was Paris and there was little he could do and the opening night was a sensation!

Paris loved Adelaide and Adelaide loved Paris. Racial attitudes here were the most relaxed in Europe and she felt an affinity with the city.

3 Back in America Blackbirds went on tour, but after performing continuously in the show for 2 years, she was exhausted, resentful and felt exploited. She left and soon was touring on the Vaudeville circuit in Variety. But the Depression was deepening. Seen as as an expensive luxury, the entertainment industry was one of the first casualties of an ailing economy. Queues were no longer formed outside the theatres, but were outside churches and salvation halls. Theatres were plunged into darkness and one journalist likened the desertion to a plague “It’s as if they’d fallen ill with a mysterious virus”. But people still needed to escape and Adelaide herself earned a fortunate this time. Her success continued. In 1931 she found herself performing in Chicago where she received an invitation to sing for gangster Al Capone. Escorted personally to his headquarters, this was not the kind of invitations to which you could say no! Adelaide dedicated her signature song “I Can’t Give You Anything, But Love Baby” to Capone and all went well. On returning to her dressing room she found a brown envelope thickly stuffed with bank notes on the side.

In 1932 Adelaide found herself in London headlining at the London Palladium, the most prestigious variety theatre in Britain. London was excited by her arrival and her visit helped spread the popularity of American Jazz, clearing the path for future artists to follow.

She sang for Edward, Prince of Wales who was said to be a big fan and it was rumoured that he had pursued her romantically at one point. Back in America and on a visit to Ohio, Adelaide heard of Art Tatum, the genius pianist who was almost blind in both eyes. She invited him over to the theatre, ran through some numbers and hired him on the spot. It is well documented by jazz historians that it was Adelaide who gave him his first break.

The tour took them into the dusty plains of middle America. Restrooms were signposted “whites only” and most restaurants and cafes refused to serve the black community. Bert particularly encountered many racial attacks. The tour took its toll on Adelaide. The workload was relentless and she was suffering from anxiety and fear of failure. She yearned for a home of her own and fell in love with a place in Larchmont, Westchester County. What the couple didn’t know though as they prepared to move in was that their neighbours had embarked on a vicious smear campaign to remove them from the community. A campaign of hatred flared up and on the day she moved into her new home she was unprepared for the scale of antagonism that would greet her.

As they approached the house a large group of protesters blocked the roadway. A small squad of police officers were there to help maintain order, but despite this the mass surged forward, surrounding the car and waving their clenched fists at them. The police seemed incapable of regaining order. Somehow Bert managed to get through to the house, but it was a miracle no-one was hurt. The two were in shock and Adelaide was inconsolable.

4 That night they were awoken intruders. Bert went to investigate, but slipped and fell, knocking himself unconscious. Thankfully the police arrived just in time and Adelaide, heavily sedated, slept through the whole thing. She was determined that she would fight for the right to live in her new home. “I’m a true American” she said “with American Indian blood in my veins”. She was staying put. Her brave stand and belief in equality touched the ‘very core of American democracy’ and eventually the local residents retreated. No police charges were ever filed against the perpetrators though and animosity remained. The Cotton Club was the glamorous New York City nightclub known by some as “The Aristocrat of Harlem”. Adelaide headlined the revue at The Cotton Club in 1934, the first after prohibition was lifted and it was a huge success. During Adelaide’s rendition of “Ill Wind” nitrogen smoke was used to cover the floor of the stage. It was the first time the effect had ever been used on a stage and caused a sensation. The legacy of the Cotton Club enriches popular music even today. During her residency, Adelaide commuted to Larchmont and anonymous death threats would arrive with alarming regularity. Her home became her prison and she was feeling trapped. In America Adelaide had inspired a whole generation of black female vocalists and pioneered new ground, but it was time to do something different, something radical. Europe was beckoning. Little did Adelaide know as her ship pulled out of New York that it would be many years before she would return. Adelaide and Bert settled in Paris and the artistic Montmartre with its breathtaking views over the city was their new home. By now Adolf Hitler with his radical views against minority groups had seized power in Germany and it would not be long before events overtook them.

In 1936 when the Olympics were held in Berlin, Adelaide travelled to sing at Berlin’s Rex Theatre, a performance which was notable for contravening Hitler's ban on jazz music. The following year Bert opened a nightclub, The Big Apple or La Gross Pomme, in which Adelaide would frequently entertain. Holding around 200 people, she would make a dramatic entrance down a spiral staircase from the attic. Here she developed her own version of the Can-Can, which she named “the canned apple”. Other clubs were going under, but Bert’s became a roaring success, in no small part due to Adelaide’s appearances and it was a magnet for rich and famous celebrities. One day English producer Basil Dean arrived at the club to offer Adelaide a starring role in his next production The Sun Never Sets at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

In London the show was well received , but Adelaide found the British reserve difficult. Whilst in Britain her old friend Fats Waller arrived and asked Adelaide to record with him at the Abbey Road studios.

By now war on the horizon and American citizens were being recalled. Bert and Adelaide had a decision to make. La Grosse Pomme closed it’s doors to the public and they moved permanently to London.

Here they opened a new enterprise, The Old Florida Club in Mayfair, but soon World War II broke out and London was in the grip of the Blitz. The club was reduced to rubble in an air raid. During the war, Adelaide entertained in underground shelters and throughout London, helping to keep the morale of the people high.

5 One night Adelaide was on stage in Lewisham when the the air raid siren sounded. The sound of bombs could be heard exploding around them, but through it all she kept singing. By the time the all clear sounded at 3.45am she had sung 54 encores. Even today she is thought to hold the world record for the highest number of encores by a single artist in one performance. She could also be heard singing on BBC radio. Recordings for Decca included wartime favourites such as 'As Time Goes By', and 'I'm Gonna Love That Guy'. She joined ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association, in which she served as Captain and travelled to Europe to entertain the troops. She was one of the first entertainers to enter Germany before the war was over. Adelaide’s career continued to blossom and through radio contracts, television, concert tours, recordings, musicals and their London nightclubs, she became one of Britain’s highest earning entertainers. Bert died in 1963 and after this her career declined for a couple of decades until she unexpectedly found her career re-ignited, with the release of The Cotton Club. In 1988 Adelaide travelled to New York and played to a sold out Carnegie Hall. After an absence of over 50 years she had come home and the Big Apple had not forgotten her. Adelaide Hall was an innovator and a trailblazer. Her career spanned 70 years and in 2003 she entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most enduring recording artist, having released material over eight consecutive decades. In 2018 she was named on the Evening Standard’s list of 14 "inspirational black British women throughout history”.

She last performed at Carnegie Hall just the year before she died in 1993 and she is buried with her mother in New York. At her memorial service in London, broadcaster Michael Parkinson remarked that “Adelaide lived to be 92 and never grew old”.