Adelaide Hall

Adelaide Louise Hall (20 October 1901 – 7 November 1993) was an American-born UK-based jazz singer and entertainer.

Adelaide Hall was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, to Elizabeth and William Hall in 1901.

Adelaide and her sister Evelyn attended the Pratt Institute, where William Hall taught piano.

Her father died on March 23, 1917.

Three years later, Evelyn died of pneumonia on March 25, 1920 leaving Adelaide to support herself and her mother.

Her career spanned more than 70 years from 1921 until her death.

Hall began her stage career in 1921 on Broadway in the chorus line of Noble Sissle's and Eubie Blake's musical Shuffle Along. Shuffle Along became a huge hit and propelled Hall's career.

She went on to appear in a number of similar black musical shows, including Runnin' Wild on Broadway in 1923, in which she sang James P. Johnson's hit song "Old-Fashioned Love".

In 1924, Hall married the British sailor Bertram Errol Hicks, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago.

Soon after their marriage he opened a club in Harlem, New York, called "The Big Apple" and became her official business manager.

In 1925, Hall toured Europe with the Chocolate Kiddies revue.

The show included songs written by Duke Ellington.

Hall was hired to join the cast of the Chocolate Kiddies revue in New York, where they rehearsed before setting sail for Europe.

The initial tour started at Hamburg, Germany, on 17 May 1925, and ended in Paris, France, in December 1925, visiting many major cities in-between.

The revue was designed to give Europeans a sampling of black entertainment from New York.

Included in the cast were The Three Eddies, Lottie Gee, Rufus Greenlee and Thaddeus Drayton, Bobbie and Babe Goins, Charles Davis and Sam Wooding and his Orchestra.

After the initial tour disbanded, Sam Wooding and his Orchestra continued touring the Chocolate Kiddies revue for several years later.

During Hall's visit to Germany she also sang at Berlin's renowned transvestite club, the Eldorado Café.

In 1926, Hall appeared in the short-lived Broadway musical My Magnolia, which had a score written by Luckey Roberts and Alex C. Rogers, after which she appeared in Tan Town Topics with songs written by Fats Waller.

In 1926, upon Hall's return to New York after touring Europe with the Chocolate Kiddies, she was featured in Tan Town Topics, a revue containing songs written by Fats Waller and Spencer Williams.

The cast included Fats Waller, Eddie Rector and Ralph Cooper, Hall, Maude Mills, Arthur Gaines, Leondus Simmons and a dance troupe called the Tan Town Topics Vamps.

The show opened at Harlem's Lafayette Theatre on 5 April followed by a short road tour on the eastern Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit taking in Baltimore, Chicago and Philadelphia.

During July 1926, Hall appeared in residency with Lottie Gee and the Southern Syncopated Orchestra at Small's Paradise, New York.

On Tuesday, 5 October, Hall appeared again at Small's Paradise at a special party, "Handy Night", hosted by the venue to honour W. C. Handy and to celebrate the release of his newly published book Blues: An Anthology—Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs.

For entertainment, Hall, Lottie Gee, Maude White and Chic Collins provided a selection of jazz and blues numbers.

From October 1926, Hall toured America playing the TOBA circuit until September 1927 in the highly praised show Desires of 1927, conceived by J. Homer Tutt and produced by impresario Irvin C. Miller.

As the Pittsburgh Courier noted: "Adelaide Hall and assistants have some show. Speed, pretty girls, catchy music, a touch of art, which touches the border line of nudity – the names of such well-known stage celebrities as Adelaide Hall, J. Homer Tutt, Henry 'Gang' Jones, the Harmony Trio, Charles Hawkins, Arthur Porter, 'Billy' McKelvey and Clarence Nance."

Billed as the star "soubrette" of the show, Hall's performance included several songs (most notably "Sweet Virginia Bliss"), flat-foot dancing and accompanying herself on the ukulele while singing.

She performed with major artists such as Art Tatum, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Cab Calloway, Fela Sowande, Rudy Vallee, and Jools Holland, and recorded as a jazz singer with Duke Ellington (with whom she made her most famous recording, "Creole Love Call" in 1927) and with Fats Waller.

Hall then starred in Desires of 1927 (with a score written by Andy Razaf and J. C. Johnson), which toured America from October 1926 through to September 1927.

As early as July 1927, newspapers were reporting that Hall had invented a new style of singing, which she termed ‘squagel.’ One account of the effect Hall had on audiences when she 'squageled' was written up in the Exhibitors Herald in August 1927.

In New York in October 1927, Hall recorded her wordless vocals on "Creole Love Call" and "The Blues I Love To Sing" with Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, and on November 3, 1927, Hall recorded "Chicago Stomp Down" with Duke Ellington and The Chicago Footwarmers for Okeh Records.

"Creole Love Call" became a worldwide hit and catapulted both Hall's and Ellington's careers into the mainstream.

For historical reasons, the story behind "Creole Love Call"'s conception is interesting to recount: In 1927, Hall and Duke Ellington were touring in the same show, Dance Mania.

The show played several large cities before reaching New York City.

In mid-November, Hall travelled from Chicago (where she had been performing at the Sunset Café) to New York City in her Packard automobile with her husband Bert.

When they arrived in New York, Hall was approached in 7th Avenue by a reporter, who enquired about her career plans.

Early in her career, she was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance; she became based in the UK after 1938.

The venue is immortalised in Christopher Isherwood's 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, as well as in the 1972 film Cabaret and the musical of the same name.

Hall entered the Guinness Book of World Records in 2003 as the world's most enduring recording artist, having released material over eight consecutive decades.