“I wasn’t really naked. I simply didn’t have any clothes on.” 

Freda Josephine McDonald Baker was born and raised in the slums of St. Louis. After a successful audition at a local vaudeville theater, she left home at the age of 13, working as a waitress and working on the stage whenever she could. She caught her big break while dancing in the chorus for Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake‘s all-Black revue Shuffle Along. A frenetic dancer and relentless on-stage clown, she quickly attracted notice and was tapped for a bigger part in another Sissle/Blake production, 1924’s Chocolate Dandies. The show made her a star in New York and she became big in Harlem as well with performances at The Cotton Club and The Plantation Club. In 1925, she moved to Paris with the American production La Revue Nègre. Baker’s exotic dancing, uninhibited sexuality, and negligible attire — which included a skirt of feathers” — suited the Continent much more than America. “I wasn’t really naked,” she explained, “I simply didn’t have any clothes on.” She became an overnight sensation. and soon opened her own club (Chez Josephine) and starred in her first movie, the naturally exotic 1927 film La Sirene des Tropiques.

She returned to America in 1936 to star in Ziegfeld’s Follies with Bob Hope and Fanny Brice. However, Baker was subjected to a double dose of discrimination: cultural conservatives railed against the show’s promiscuity, while many hotels and restaurants refused entrance to the star of the show. Returning to Paris, she became a naturalized French citizen after marrying sugar magnate Jean Lion, though his status as a French Jew exposed the couple to additional discrimination when the Nazis invaded two years later.

Baker joined the French Resistance at an early date and worked throughout World War II to help the Allies, acting as a funnel to get important documents out of France several times, as a sub-lieutenant in the French Air Force’s Women’s Auxiliary, volunteering for the Red Cross to assist Belgian refugees streaming into France, and boosting troop morale by performing across Northern Africa. Baker earned several commendations including the Medal of Resistance and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

After the war, she worked the cabaret circuit in Paris for several years before performing in Cuba and returning to America yet again. During the early ’50s, Baker’s fight to spread the gospel of Civil Rights made headlines when she performed to integrated audiences at a nightclub in Miami and canceled an Atlanta performance after being refused admission to a hotel. 

She participated in the 1963 Civil Rights march on Washington and gave a series of four concerts at Carnegie Hall to raise funds for the cause. After suffering a heart attack in 1964, however, her performance career practically ended, except for a brief comeback just before her death from a stroke in 1975.

Music: Josephine Baker from 1926, singing “La Vie en Rose”

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Few casual fans of Jazz recognize the name of Cal Massey. Sadly ignored by countless Jazz critics, Massey was revered by the foremost musicians of his day as a genius of composition and as a solid trumpeter. John Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Archie Shepp, and many others have performed and recorded Massey‘s works. He was a forceful activist for the Black Liberation Movement and was seen as a pillar of his community.

While he was raised in Pittsburgh, Massey‘s family moved back to his birth city of Philadelphia in his teenage years, where by a chance encounter he earned a spot in Jimmy Heath’s big band trumpet section. The group featured a young alto sax player that immediately captivated Massey’s attention: John Coltrane. The two became lifetime friends and Massey’s song Bakai was recorded by Coltrane on the latter’s first recording session as a leader. Massey also contributed to Coltrane’s Africa/Brass sessions, notably “The Damned Don’t Cry,” which would become part of his seminal work The Black Liberation Movement Suite. 

The Black Liberation Movement Suite is Massey‘s masterpiece, thrusting him onto the same level as fellow composers and contemporaries Sun Ra and Charles Mingus. It was premiered at the first of a series of benefit concerts for the Black Panthers, but has rarely been performed since the 1970’s. More recently, Fred Ho rerecorded the suite with a large group ensemble, Each movement has a close connection to the B.L.M., with some numbers dedicated to heroes of the Civil Rights movement like Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Fred Ho, the late baritone saxophonist and Massey expert, related that in the early 1960’s, Massey stepped into an elevator with Francis Wolff, co-owner of the iconic Blue Note records. According to Massey‘s wife Charlotte, Massey attempted to speak to Wolff, but Wolff ignored him. Out of frustration, Massey kicked Wolff as he left the elevator. From then on, Massey was effectively blacklisted by Blue Note and other prominent record labels. If true, this and Massey’s ideology could have resulted in him getting blacklisted (or “whitelisted” according to Fred Ho) from major recording companies and only one album was recorded under his name, contributing to Massey‘s relative obscurity in the Jazz legacy.

Music: From 1961’s “Africa/Brass” – The John Coltrane Quartet with “The Damned Don’t’ Cry”

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A child prodigy born in the midst of Black artistic expression in Philadelphia, a leader who never learned to read music, yet excelled at it along the way, she grew up to be a fine swing pianist and nightclub entertainer. 

Beryl Booker began her star-filled career as a girl sweeping kitchen floors for quarters while also touring the local amateur circuit as a preschool pianist, winning awards so frequently that rival parents complained to theater managers.

By her teens, she was performing regularly in clubs and theaters, where her big break came in the personage of bassist Slam Stewart. Stewart was one of the most recorded jazz bassists of the 1940s, and  although he sworn that he never work with women, he was so impressed by Booker’s playing that he invited her to join his trio.

Beryl Booker would go on to lead various trios from 1952 to 1954, including an engagement at the Embers in 1953 and a tour of Europe in 1954 (occasionally with Billie Holiday), and another tour with Dinah Washington in 1959. The even made a film appearance in the 1947 film, Boy What a Girl!.

Booker’s good friend, journalist Thom Nickels learned that she’d earned acclaim from Nat King Cole, received Christmas cards from Lena Horn, and urged her buddy “Frankie” Sinatra to record “Little Girl Blue” – which he did. Nickels said Booker was a self-made woman who turned racist attitudes on their heads in the Jim Crow South.

“She used to talk to me about traveling through the South when she couldn’t get into certain restaurants with her band,” recalled Nickels. “When Beryl was hungry and wanted a hamburger, she would do anything. So she would say, ‘I’m really an Indian princess; you have to let me in,’ and conned her way into a lot of these no-Blacks-allowed restaurants all throughout the South. She was a trickster. She was a handful. She was highly talented and extremely funny. Sometimes outrageously so.”

Music: The Beryl Booker Trio from 1953 with “Ebony”

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Rising from extreme poverty and neglect in Baltimore, Ethel Waters attended a costume party
on her 17 th birthday, at a nightclub on Juniper Street. She was persuaded to sing two songs and
impressed the audience so much that she was offered professional work at the Lincoln Theatre
in Baltimore. After her start in Baltimore, she was asked to join the Braxton and Nugent
Vaudeville Show where she became an overnight sensation after singing “St. Louis Blues,” the
only woman to have done so at that time, and establishing herself as a recording artist, Waters
crossed the country on a national tour.

She became the first African American woman to integrate Broadway when composer Irving
Berlin awarded Waters a starring role in his Broadway musical “As Thousands Cheer”, also
becoming one of the highest paid actresses on Broadway regardless of race. Her Broadway
acclaim led Waters into a career in film and later television, including an appearance in the all-
black film, Cabin in the Sky, which stared Lena Horne and was directed by Vincente Minnelli.

Ethel Waters was a devoted advocate for actors’ rights serving on the executive council of
Actors Equity and the Negro Actors Guild of America, and, during World War II, she was part of
the Hollywood Victory Committee singing on the radio for the USO camp shows. She was the
second African American to be nominated for an Academy Award, the first African American to
star in her own television show, and the first African American woman to be nominated for a
primetime Emmy.

She married three times (her first marriage was at age 13) and had no children. In the early
phases of her career, Waters identified as bisexual but never made a public announcement
about her sexuality. During the 1920s, she lived with her girlfriend Ethel Williams. Waters
enjoyed a large lesbian and gay following, including devoted fan Carl Van Vechten, who took
the portraits of Waters found in the National Museum of African American of History and
Culture collection.

Her first autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, (1951), written with Charles Samuels, was
adapted for the stage by Larry Parr and premiered on October 7, 2005.

Music: From 1933, Ethel Waters singing “Stormy Weather”

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