The real first lady of jazz: Adelaide Hall performed around the world, including in Croydon
CROYDON CHRONICLES: Adelaide Hall performed at the Cotton Club, sang with Duke Ellington and took to the stage in the Berlin of Sally Bowles. And she was a star of the old Croydon Empire, as DAVID MORGAN explains
It was a Monday evening in mid-February 1942, during the darkest days of the war. The people gathered in the audience at the Croydon Empire were looking forward to something to brighten up their lives. And they were not to be disappointed.
Three acts were given joint top billing on the poster advertising that week’s programme, two comedians and a singer: Jack Edge, “The Royal Jester”: Joe Young, “Your Favourite Comedian”. And then there was Adelaide Hall, who was billed as “The Crooning Blackbird”.
Whoever drafted that Croydon Empire was selling Hall short.
The Croydon audience that night was to see one of the great singing talents to grace the London stage, the “real first lady of jazz” who would become one of the first black artists to regularly appear on BBC radio, even having her own show, Wrapped in Velvet, before becoming the first black woman singer to appear in the Royal Variety Performance, when it was staged at the Victoria Palace Theatre in 1951.
Adelaide Hall would go on to be listed in the 2018 Evening Standard poll as one of the most influential black women in British history.
Yet her story has too often been overlooked.
Born in Brooklyn in 1901, Hall’s first professional job was in the chorus line of Shuffle Along which opened at New York’s 63rd Street Theatre in May 1921. The all-black cast performed numbers including Love Will Find A Way and I’m Just Wild About Harry, and was a huge success, running for more than 500 performances.
Hall performed throughout the prohibition era, and also when there were strict race segregation laws in America. She would also experience racism and hatred, which would eventually force her to decide to leave America.
In 1924, Hall married Bertram Hicks, a Trinidadian who had spent time working as a sailor. After their wedding, Hicks became her manager. The couple bought a nightclub in Harlem and called it The Big Apple.
Hall’s popularity really took off. She sang in a revue which came to Europe in 1926 featuring Sam Wooding and his Orchestra. During their stay in Berlin, Hall performed at the El Dorado club, which was immortalised in Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel, Goodbye to Berlin, and subsequently in the musical and film Cabaret.
Scat cats: Hall had a career-long musical partnership with Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington contributed to the revue’s score, beginning a musical partnership with Hall which lasted a lifetime. He encouraged her to be one of the first scat vocalists in jazz.
In 1927, when they recorded Creole Love Call, it was Hall’s improvised vocals which set the standard for scat vocalisations.
Hall’s friendship with Duke Ellington resulted in her singing in his memorial service which was held in St Martin in the Fields after his death in 1974.
In 1927, Hall returned to New York and starred in two shows, Tan Town Topics, with music written by Fats Waller, and Desires of 1927.
Blackbirds of 28 was the next Broadway success for Hall, where she co-starred with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in another black cast revue. Hall would sing a song which was to become a classic: I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.
The Cotton Club in New York was where Hall headlined in 1934, starring in its latest revue. The show opened on March 11 1934, ran for eight months and was the highest-grossing show in the famous club’s history, attracting more than 600,000 customers. Hall’s memorable song from this run was Ill Wind. One of the chorus line in that revue was a 16-year-old Lena Horne.
Later in life she recalled teaching the silent movie star Rudolph Valentino how to dance the Charleston, how she went partying with George Gershwin and the time she sang for mobster Al Capone.
Hall loved the evening she spent in the company of Gloria Swanson, her visit to Douglas Fairbanks’ house in Beverley Hills and giggled at the Broadway producer Lew Leslie who insured her legs for half a million dollars in 1929.
It was after her run at the Cotton Club that Hall and her husband left America for good.
Hall had already been over to Europe on several occasions. The Blackbirds revue was staged at the Moulin Rouge in Paris for four months in 1929 and she appeared at the London Palladium for a two-week run in 1931. The time at the Palladium brought her a contract with the Decca label, recording eight songs.
Top billing: Adelaide Hall in the Blackbirds Review from 1928
She would appear in the Guinness Book of Records as an artist who had released recordings for eight consecutive decades.
With Hall earning good money, she and her husband bought a very expensive house in Larchmont, in up-state New York. The couple moved in, together with Hall’s mother, but the well-off white community were unwilling to accept a black family into their community. A legal challenge to their buying the house failed. Someone then torched the house.
Hall was unwilling to risk to the safety of her mother, so they moved back to New York City. But life in America was tainted, hence the move to Europe.
In 1935 they moved to Paris where she and her husband bought another nightclub, which they calledLa Grosse Pomme. It was here that Hall was credited with introducing Parisians to The Truckin’ Dance craze which had been popularised in Harlem a few years before.
In 1936, Hall caused quite a stir by singing at Berlin’s Rex Theatre during the time that the Olympic Games were being staged in the city. She broke Hitler’s ban on jazz music (“degenerate”), although no action was taken against her.
Hall and Hicks moved to London in 1938, where they were to settle permanently. She starred in a musical, The Sun Never Sets, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, with the costumes designed by Croydon woman, Elizabeth Haffenden.
Top clubs: Adelaide Hall performed in some of the world’s most famous venues, starring at the Cotton Club
The Florida Club in South Bruton Mews in Mayfair was acquired by Hall and her husband. There was no play on words with “apple” in the name this time. The Florida Club would be where friends such as Fats Waller would meet.
The building was destroyed by German bombing in 1940, forcing Hall to find other outlets for her singing.
The radio, the music halls and ENSA all benefited, as did the film industry. Hall appeared in the 1940 film, Thief of Baghdad, in a cameo role as a nurse and sang Lullaby of the Princess.
Jack Seaton, the chair of the British Music Hall Society in the 1940s, recalled that Hall was quite a character during the war years. “She was a bit of a handful. She always wanted to be picked up in a car and would pile mountains of dresses in the back. You couldn’t move in the car for all her clothes.
“Then she would start eating chocolate biscuits, talking about Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong whilst she told the story of jazz. When you got back to her flat there would be biscuit crumbs all in the car and when you arrived at her flat, she would ask you to take all the costumes back up to her flat.
“She did it to everybody but we all loved her.”
Entertaining allied soldiers made Hall a popular figure. In October 1939, she appeared at RAF Hendon in a live BBC broadcast, the first large-scale concert organised by ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association.
Croydon appearance: the bill for the Empire Music Hall in February 1942
As the war went on, and after the United States joined the conflict, she prepared personal welcomes for the increasing numbers of American soldiers who were arriving in this country. She gained a reputation as a fearless performer, often entertaining the troops in combat zones which had not long been in Allied hands. She performed in Germany at the end of the war before the country had been fully secured.
Hall’s 1942 booking at the Croydon Empire wasn’t her only appearance there. She sang in several fundraising concerts arranged by musical director Jack Morgan, topped the bill in a 1943 show and in 1946 appeared in Black and White, with Norman Parry at the piano.
Adelaide Hall continued to perform for many years in all sorts of venues, including the Royal Albert Hall and Carnegie Hall. In 1970, by now in her late 60s, she even made her debut in pantomime in Dick Whittington.
When Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Cotton Club was released in 1984, it brought Hall to the attention of a new generation. She was featured on The South Bank Show arts programme and in 1989 was the subject of a longer documentary, Sophisticated Lady.
When Adelaide Hall died in 1993, aged 92, tributes flooded in.
Michael Parkinson, the broadcaster, said, “Adelaide lived to be 92, but she never grew old.”
Theatrical agent Keith Salberg said: “She was one of the greatest performers I have ever seen. It was a privilege to work with her. She was unique in that she could play anywhere.
“She was a jazz legend – but she was just as happy performing in variety, or in a play or in a musical. I can truthfully say that when she walked on stage, she simply lit up the whole theatre. Not many people could do that.”
A blue plaque to commemorate Adelaide Hall has been put up at 1, Collingham Road, Kensington, where she lived for many years.
Adelaide Hall is a name that should be remembered much more widely.
David Morgan, pictured right, has been chronicling Croydon’s history for Inside Croydon for almost a decade. Morgan is a former Croydon headteacher, now the volunteer education officer at Croydon Minster, who offers tours or illustrated talks on the history around the Minster for local community groups
If you would like a group tour of Croydon Minster or want to book a school visit, then ring the Minster Office on 020 688 8104 or go to the website on www.croydonminster.org and use the contact page
Some previous articles by David Morgan:
- Music Hall performer whose potato song helped the war effort
- From a few lines in Henry V, actor stood alongside the greats
- Cycle Carnival saw thousands lining the streets for good cause
- The church fire that consumed a thousand years of history
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