Crooner Culture

This week’s crooner is Lena Horne! Here’s some info on the legendary “woo-woo-woo-woo” female jazz crooner:

• Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York City, New York. She grew up in an upper middle class black bourgeois community.
• Horne became the first African American performer to sign a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio, namely Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She made her debut with MGM in 1942’s Panama Hattie and became famous in 1943 for her rendition of Stormy Weather in the movie of the same name (which she made while on loan to 20th Century Fox from MGM).

• She appeared in Broadway musicals several times and in 1958 was nominated for the Tony Award for “Best Actress in a Musical” (for her part in the “Calypso” musical Jamaica) In 1981 she received a Special Tony Award for her one-woman show, Lena Horne: “The Lady and Her Music”. Despite the show’s considerable success (Horne still holds the record for the longest-running solo performance in Broadway history), she was not inclined to capitalize on the renewed interest in her career by undertaking many new musical projects. A proposed 1983 joint recording project between Horne and Frank Sinatra (to be produced by Quincy Jones) was ultimately abandoned, and her sole studio recording of the decade was 1988’s The Men In My Life, featuring sentimental duets with Sammy Davis, Jr. and Joe Williams. In 1989, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
• In 2003, ABC announced that Janet Jackson would star as Horne in a television biopic (after it was rumored for years that Whitney Houston would take the job). In the weeks following Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” debacle during the 2004 Super Bowl, however, Variety reported that Horne demanded Jackson be dropped from the project. “ABC executives resisted Horne’s demand,” according to the Associated Press report, “but Jackson representatives told the trade newspaper that she left willingly after Horne and her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, asked that she not take part.” Oprah Winfrey stated to Alicia Keys during a 2005 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show that she might possibly consider producing the biopic herself, casting Keys as Horne.
• Horne was married first to Louis Jones, by whom she had a daughter, Gail and a son, Edwin. Her second marriage was to Lennie Hayton, a Jewish American, from 1947 until his death in 1971. Hayton was one of the premier musical conductors and arrangers at MGM. In her as-told-to autobiography Lena by Richard Schickel, Horne recounts the enormous pressures she and her husband faced as an interracial married couple. However, she later admitted (Ebony, May 1980) that she really married Hayton to advance her career and cross the “color-line” in show business. She is also a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.

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