Adelaide Louise Hall (October 1901 – November 1993) was an American-born UK-based jazz singer and entertainer. Her long career spanned more than 70 years from 1921 until her death and she was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. 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. She performed with major artists such as Art Tatum Ethel Waters,Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, 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.
Adelaide Hall was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Elizabeth and Arthur William Hall and was taught to sing by her father. She began her stage career in 1921 on Broadway in the chorus line of the Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake hit musical Shuffle Along and went on to appear in a number of similar black musical shows including Runnin’ Wild[ on Broadway in 1923 in which she was given James P. Johnson’s hit song “Old-Fashioned Love” to sing, Chocolate Kiddies in 1925 (European tour) that included songs written by Duke Ellington, My Magnolia on Broadway in 1926 with a score written by Luckey Roberts and Alex C. Rogers, Tan Town Topics in 1926 with songs written byFats Waller and in Desires of 1927 (American tour October 1926 through to September 1927) with a score written by Andy Razaf and J. C. Johnson.
Creole Love Call
In 1924, Hall married a British sailor born in Trinidad, Bertram Errol Hicks. Soon after their marriage he opened a short-lived club in Harlem, New York, called ‘The Big Apple’ and became her official business manager.
In October 1927, Hall recorded her wordless vocals on “Creole Love Call”, “The Blues I Love To Sing” and “Chicago Stomp Down” with Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. The recordings were worldwide hits and catapulted both Hall’s and Ellington’s careers into the mainstream.
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 opened at theLafayette Theatre in Harlem on 14 November and played there for one week before travelling to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to appear at the Standard Theatre. Hall closed the first half of the bill and Duke was on in the second. Duke had a new number, Creole Love Call, which he included in his set. Hall recounted, “I was standing in the wings behind the piano when Duke first played it (Creole Love Call). I started humming along with the band. He stopped the number and came over to me and said, ‘That’s just what I was looking for. Can you do it again?’ I said, ‘I can’t, because I don’t know what I was doing.’ He begged me to try. Anyway, I did, and sang this counter melody, and he was delighted and said ‘Addie, you’re going to record this with the band.’ A couple of days later I did“. When Duke was recounting the incident to a reporter he explained, “We had to do something to employ Adelaide Hall,” and then added, “I always say we are primitive artists, we only employ the materials at hand … the band is an accumulation of personalities, tonal devices.”
In December 1927, Ellington and his Orchestra commenced their residency at Harlem’s Cotton Club in a revue called Rhythmania. The show featured Hall singing “Creole Love Call”. In 1928, “Creole Love Call” entered the Billboard song charts at #19 (USA). On January 7, 1933, Hall and Duke Ellington and his Famous Orchestra recorded “I Must Have That Man” and “Baby”.
I Can’t Give You Anything But Love
In 1928, Hall starred on Broadway with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in Blackbirds of 1928. The show became the most successful all-black show ever staged on Broadway at that time and made Hall and Bojangles into household names. Blackbirds of 1928 was the idea of impresario Lew Leslie, who planned to build the show around Florence Mills in New York after her success in the hit London show Blackbirds but Mills died of pneumonia in 1927 before rehearsals commenced. Hall was chosen to replace her. The revue originally opened at Les Ambassadeurs Club in New York in January 1928, under the name Blackbird Revue, but it was renamed Blackbirds of 1928 and in May 1928 transferred to Broadway’s Liberty Theatre, where it ran for 518 performances. After a slow start, the show became the hit of the season. Hall’s performance of “Diga Diga Do”, created a sensation.
In the fall of 1932, upon her return to New York, Hall and her husband purchased the lease on an exclusive freehold residential estate in Larchmont in the New York suburb of Westchester County. As news of her arrival in Larchmont leaked into the local media she began to encounter racist opposition from her white upper-middle-class prejudiced neighbours, who threatened court action to have Hall evicted. After her home was broken into and an attempt was made to set it alight, news of the attack hit national newspaper headlines. Receiving hundreds of letters of support from the American public imploring her to stick it out, Hall stood her ground and in a press statement she issued insisted that she was a true American citizen as her ancestry could be traced back to the Shinnecock Indian tribe of Long Island and as such she had every right to reside where she wished.
Say You’re Mine
Her career in Britain spanned almost 60 years, from 1938 to 1993.
Adelaide Hall was one of the major entertainers of the Harlem Renaissance. Along with Louis Armstrong, she pioneered scat singing and is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s first jazz singers. Indeed, Ella Fitzgerald regarded her as such. Hall was the first female vocalist to sing and record with Duke Ellington. She holds the accolade of being the 20th century’s most enduring female recording artist, her recording career having spanned eight decades. In 1941, Hall replaced Gracie Fields as Britain’s highest paid female entertainer.
In the “100 Great Records of the 1920s” Adelaide Hall is at number 26 with Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, singing “The Blues I Love To Sing” (Duke Ellington/Bubber Miley).
Influential writer Langston Hughes in his book Famous Negro Music Makers (published by Dodd, Mead, 1955) lists individual musicians that helped develop jazz, after which he states that ‘jazz singers too, had not been without influence on the development of this (Jazz) music,’ and then includes Adelaide Hall alongside Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway,Ray Nance and Joe Carroll, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Albert Hunter, Baby Cox and Florence Mills as all being outstanding jazz vocalists of their time.
Adelaide Hall is mentioned in the novel Strange Brother (set in New York in the late 20’s, early 30’s) written by Blair Niles and first published in 1931.
Published in 1998, Marsha Hunt’s novel Like Venus Fading was inspired by the lives of Adelaide Hall (known as the lightly-tanned Venus), Josephine Baker and Dorothy Dandridge.
When Harry Met Addie composed by Gavin Bryars (1999). Bryars wrote When Harry Met Addie as a tribute to Adelaide Hall and saxophonist Harry Carney. The piece was first performed at the Duke Ellington Memorial Concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London on May 1, 1999 and was commissioned by the baritone saxophonist/bass clarinettist John Surman. The soprano was Cristina Zavalloni and the London Sinfonietta Big Band was conducted by Diego Masson.
Hall was loosely portrayed as the nightclub chanteuse in the Francis Ford Coppola 1984 movie The Cotton Club.
It was Hall’s husband, Bert Hicks, who suggested to Eric Bartholomew’s mother that he should change his stage name to Morecambe, after the place of her son’s birth, thereby christening the British comic duo Morecambe and Wise.
During 2013, British singer Laura Mvula revealed in a Blues and Soul interview with assistant editor Pete Lewis that her song “Sing to the Moon” (from her hit debut album Sing to the Moon, RCA/Sony Music) was inspired by the 2003 biography of Adelaide Hall entitled Underneath a Harlem Moon: The Harlem to Paris Years of Adelaide Hall, by Iain Cameron Williams:
Well, the actual song ‘Sing to the Moon’ came from a time when I was reading a book called Underneath a Harlem Moon, which is a biography of a jazz singer called Adelaide Hall, which is basically all about how she kind of was overlooked, or probably didn’t get the recognition she perhaps deserved. Plus it also talks about how she’d had a hard time growing up, because her sister – who she was very close to – had died tragically of an illness…. So anyway, there’s a point in the story where she describes her close relationship with her father, which I think kind of resonated with me – where she talks about the conversations she had with him and how he used to say to her randomly ‘Sing to the moon and the stars will shine’, which kind of became her thing really that she just took with her everywhere…. And I don’t know why, but for some reason it just struck some kind of chord with me – you know, it was just something I seemed to connect with at that time. And so because of that, it then became a saying that I liked to use myself…. So yeah, because it’s become something I personally like to express, I just thought ‘Sing to the Moon’ would also make a good title for the album as a whole.
On 11 August 2014, Mvula released her second album, an orchestral version of her top 10 debut album Sing to the Moon, and on 19 August 2014 Laura appeared at The Proms at the Royal Albert Hall performing her entire album Sing to the Moon accompanied by the Metropole Orkest.
A new musical revue After Midnight featuring the classic music of Duke Ellington, Dorothy Fields & Jimmy McHugh, and Harold Arlen, premiered to much praise at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in New York on November 3, 2013 and was booked through to August 31, 2014. The show is an idealized fantasy of Harlem in its 1920’s–1930’s heyday and salutes black musicians and performers such as Ethel Waters, Adelaide Hall, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and the Nicholas Brothers, who became international stars during that era.
At least three of the songs that Adelaide Hall introduced to the world are performed in the show, including headliner Fantasia Barrinos rendition of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby” and Carmen Ruby Floyd’s performance of Ellington and Hall’s “Creole Love Call”. The song “Diga Diga Do” also appears in the show.
In February 2014 a new stage show called A Nite at the Cotton Club, produced by Lydia Dillingham, opened at the Southern Broadway Dinner Theatre at The Historic Hildreth Brothers Building in Alabama, USA, in which the actress Brandy Davis portrays Adelaide Hall. The entire run sold out.
In February 2014, ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) celebrated their Centenary by publishing a timeline of songs chosen to represent the past hundred years. One song was chosen to represent each year. Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh’s song “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby”, written for the Broadway revue Blackbirds of 1928, was chosen for 1928 and Adelaide Hall’s recording of the song was chosen to represent the year.