Her career began at the tender age of 14. At that time, Adelaide Hall, born in New York on October 20, 1901, performed with her sister Evelyn as a piano and singing duo at church and school festivals. Her father works as a music professor at the Pratt Institute in New York, where she and her sister study. But early on she has to come to terms with the loss of both of them. Her father died in 1917, and just three years later her sister also succumbed to influenza.
From now on, Hall and her mother are on their own. In 1921, the 20-year-old became part of the choir in the African-American Broadway musical “Shuffle Along” and later appeared in the musical “Runnin’ Wild.” In 1924, Hall married the British Bert Hicks. She later described the merchant seaman, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, as “an important support” in her career in an interview. After initially touring parts of Europe – including Austria, Scandinavia, Berlin and the Soviet Union – in 1926 as the star of the musical “Chocolate Kiddies”, she met the famous jazz musician Duke Ellington in 1927. He recognized her talent and recorded several songs with her and his orchestra throughout her career, such as the famous “Creole Love Call”.
In 1928, Hall joined the musical “Blackbirds” after its leading actress, Florence Mills, suddenly died at the age of 31. The musical is also a great success at the famous Moulin Rouge in Paris. Because they were subjected to racist abuse in their New York home, an all-white neighborhood in Larchmont, Westchester County, Hall and her husband went to Paris in the mid-1930s. Here Hall appears at the Moulin Rouge and the Lido. Thanks to her husband’s French language skills, the couple buys a club called “La Grosse Pomme” (“Big Apple”), where Hall performs a cabaret show every evening.
Four years later, the couple moved to London shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1938. Hall and her husband also opened a club here, but it was destroyed in an air raid in 1939. During World War II, Hall travels to war zones to entertain American and British troops in Europe. Throughout her career, the singer has also made several appearances as an actress in films and television shows. She continues to publish her songs well into her old age and works with greats such as Louis Armstrong and Josephine Baker.
In 2003, her work even earned her an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the most consistent female artist to have released recordings in eight consecutive decades. The first recording with Duke Ellington was made on October 26, 1927, and its last on June 16, 1991.
After a brief illness, Hall died on November 7, 1993 at the age of 92. On the occasion of her 122nd birthday, Google is honoring the singer with a doodle.
See in the photo gallery: Visitors to New York City are now spoiled for choice: In addition to classics like the Empire State Building, there are four other observation decks on skyscrapers that surpass each other in terms of superlatives.
Quellen: imdb.com, Africa Stories in Hull and East Yorkshire, British Library, wikibrief.org
