Black History, The Arts
Vinnette Carroll
Vinnette Carroll was the first African-American woman to direct a production on Broadway. Vinnette Carroll was born on March 11, 1922 in New York City to Florence and Edgar Carroll. When Vinnette was three the family moved to Jamaica; subsequently, she spent much of her childhood in the West Indies. She received a BA from Long Island University in 1944; and an MA from New York University in 1946; followed by doctoral work in psychology at Columbia University. Carroll’s father encouraged his daughters to become physicians, and as a compromise, Vinnette chose psychology. Carroll worked as a clinical psychologist with the NYC Bureau of Child Guidance before beginning to study acting.
In 1948 she accepted a scholarship to attend the Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research and studied with Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Margaret Barker, and Susan Steele. She made her professional stage debut at the Falmouth Playhouse acting in Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. (more…)
Black History, The Arts
(b. Nov. 24, 1868, Bowie county, Texas, U.S.–d. April 1, 1917, New York, N.Y.), American black composer and pianist known as the “king of ragtime” at the turn of the 20th century.
Studying piano with teachers near his childhood home, Joplin traveled through the Midwest from the mid-1880s, performing at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Settling in Sedalia, Mo., in 1895, he studied music at the George R. Smith College for Negroes and hoped for a career as a concert pianist and classical composer. His first published songs brought him fame, and in 1900 he moved to St. Louis to work more closely with the music publisher John Stark. (more…)
Black History, Music, The Arts
W.C. Handy
1873-1958 b. Florence, Ala. William Christopher Handy was largely self-taught, Handy began his career as a cornet player in a minstrel show in 1896, and later organized various small bands.
He was among the first to set down the blues, and with his Memphis Blues (1912), originally entitled Mr. Crump (1909), he rose to prominence. His songs, such as St. Louis Blues (1914) and Beale Street Blues (1917), are the classic examples of their type.
In 1918 he moved from Memphis to New York City and remained active as a writer and publisher of music, in spite of growing blindness, until shortly before his death. (more…)
Black History, The Arts
Thelma ‘Butterfly’ McQueen
1811-1995 – Stage and film actress best remembered for her part in film history with Gone With the Wind (1939). McQueen received her nickname of ?Butterfly? when she appeared in the Harlem Theater group’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Butterfly ballet sequence. Despite the notice she received from her role in Gone With the Wind, roles became harder to get and she was out of films by the 1950s.
She worked at various jobs, including waitress at a soul food restaurant, a receptionist, and dance instructor between occasional acting jobs in small parts on Broadway. She received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1975 from New York’s City College at the age of 64 and had a radio show in Augusta, Georgia before she died in a fire that consumed her one-bedroom cottage.
Black History, The Arts
Jean-Michel Basquiat
b. Brooklyn, N.Y. Born into a middle-class Haitian and Puerto Rican family, he was a 1980s art star whose rise and fall were rapid and dramatic. A rebel, high school dropout, and part of the downtown New York scene, he was influenced by the violence of street life and by the life and work of Andy Warhol, who became his mentor.
Basquiat started as a graffiti artist, making images and writing slogans on the walls of buildings, and also produced painted T-shirts, found-object assemblages, and paintings.
In the early 1980s he was ‘discovered’ by the art establishment, and his works in paint and crayon on unprimed canvas, featuring crude, angry, and rawly powerful figures and graffiti-like written messages, were much sought after by collectors.
Basquiat’s art focused on “suggestive dichotomies,” such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. Basquiat appropriated poetry, drawing and painting, and married text and image, abstraction and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. (more…)
Black History, The Arts
Big Joe Turner
One of the key figures, the vehicle we took from R&B to Rock N’Roll, was Big Joe Turner. Born in 1911 in Kansas City, Big Joe’s dad was killed when he was 15. To help his family, Joe worked at a variety of odd jobs..from shining shoes to running liquor. In 1929 he began to play boogie-woogie with Kermit “Pete” Johnson in clubs around the Midwest. They were discovered and brought to New York to play Carnegie Hall.
The next week they began recording for a label and a star was born. Joe was characterized by his incredible deep singing voice. He didn’t play any instruments, his voice was all he needed. New York Times music critic Robert Palmer said: “…his voice, pushing like a Count Basie solo, rich and grainy as a section of saxophones, which dominated the room with the sheer sumptuousness of its sound.” Big Joe died of kidney failure in 1985..
