Lena Horne: The Most Unforgettable Jazz Singers In History


Lena Horne is one of the most popular African-American jazz singers. She was born in 1917 and was named Lena Mary Calhoun Horne in New York. She performed with the best jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington and Artie Shaw.

She currently resides in New York and doesn't appear in the public eye anymore. Lena is most famous for the movie Stormy Weather, where she sung the title song, in the 1940's.

In contrast to how music careers commonly begin, Lena was raised in an elite family. She lived in a black bourgeois region in Brooklyn, New York.

Her dad Edwin Horne left them when she was only three-years-old. Her mother Edna Scottron, daughter of an inventor, was an actress with a black theater group and traveled quite a bit.

Lena's grandfather and grandmother raised her. Though, she was said to have been part of the Black elite, racial discrimination still was around. Lena Horne and her friend Paul Robeson set out on an ongoing effort to fight for Civil Rights.

Actually, she took the civil rights movement so seriously to the point of rejecting the offer to sing to a segregated crowd or to a large group where the black individuals were there just to serve white folks.

Even with those serious issues she still found time to become one of the most remarkable Jazz singers of all time.

She performed at the cafe society, a club emulating the European cabarets to exhibit the talents of undiscovered African Americans which generated the success of Lena Horne, Paul Robeson, Big Joe Turner, Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young, Hazel Scott, Sarah Vaughn, Josh White, Pete Johnson and Mary Lou Williams.

Lena Horne worked on a solo recording that featured duets with Sammy Davis, and Joe Williams entitled "The Men In My Life" in the year 1988.

The subsequent year she earned a Grammy Life Time Achievement Award to add to her list of credits of success she mastered in her profession.

In her early eighties, she went on to record albums titled 1994 "We'll Be Together Again", the 1995 Live album that won her a Grammy for the best Vocal Jazz Album. She also had the opportunity to sing a song with Frank Sinatra in the song "Embraceable You".

In 2000, she recorded yet another album to lend her beautiful voice to a "Classic Ellington" song. Lena Horne is actually a member of the sorority Delta Sigma Theta and has been with the label Blue Note Records since 1995.

If you're not familiar with Lena Horne, you may listen to her on the internet along with the best rock music artists by exploring: best or rock music or list of rock music.

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