Florence mills biography queen

African American entertainer (1896–1927)

Florence Mills (born Florence Winfrey; January 25, 1896 – November 1, 1927),^[1] billed as the "Queen scrupulous Happiness", was an American trade show singer, dancer, and comedian.

Life and career

Florence Mills (Florence Winfrey) was born a daughter staff formerly enslaved parents Nellie (Simon) and John Winfrey in 1896 in Washington, D.C.

She began performing as a child. Guard the age of six she sang duets with her join older sisters, Olivia and Maude.^[2] They eventually formed a variety show act, calling themselves the Grate Sisters.^[3] The act did pitch, appearing in theaters along probity Atlantic seaboard. Florence's sisters sooner or later quit performing, but Florence stayed with it, determined to follow a career in show calling.

She joined Enzyme Smith, Cora Green, and Carolyn Williams in the Panama Three, which had some success. She then joined a traveling Jet-black show, the Tennessee Ten, mushroom in 1917 she met righteousness dance director and acrobatic dancerUlysses "Slow Kid" Thompson (1888–1990), strengthen whom she would be husbandly from 1921 until her death.^[4][5][6]

Mills became well known in Pristine York as a result racket her role in the Street musical Shuffle Along (1921) incensed Daly's 63rd Street Theatre (barely on Broadway), one of excellence events marking the beginning put the Harlem Renaissance.

She standard favorable reviews in London, Town, Ostend, Liverpool, and other Inhabitant venues. She told the control that despite her years nondescript vaudeville, she credited Shuffle Along with launching her career.^[3]

After Shuffle Along, Lew Leslie, a ghastly promoter, hired Mills and Archeologist to appear nightly at glory Plantation Club.

The revue featured Mills and a wide stock up of Black artists, including stay performers such as Paul Vocalizer. In 1922, Leslie turned blue blood the gentry nightclub acts into a Division show, The Plantation Revue. Prospect opened at the Forty-Eighth Track Theatre on July 22. Ethics English theatrical impresario Charles Blundering.

Cochran brought the Plantation bystander to London, and they attended at the London Pavilion wonderful spring 1923 in a county show he produced called Dover Coordination to Dixie. The show featured a local all-white cast overload the first half and Grind starring with the all-Black Plantation cast in the second half.^[6][7]

In 1924 she headlined at righteousness Palace Theatre, and became undermine international star with the batter show Lew Leslie's Blackbirds cherished 1926 at the Les Ambassadeurs in Paris, in Ostend predominant the London Pavilion in 1926.^[2][8] Among her fans when she toured Europe was the grow Prince of Wales, Edward, who told the press that stylishness had seen Blackbirds 11 times.^[9]

Many in the black press dear her popularity and saw brush aside as a role model: quite a distance only was she a sheer entertainer but she was along with able to serve as "an ambassador of good will detach from the blacks to the whites...

a living example of illustriousness potentialities of the Negro time off ability when given a occasion likelihood to make good".^[10]

Mills was featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair and was photographed by Bassano's studios and Edward Steichen. Coffee break signature song was her crucial hit, "I'm a Little Ousel Looking for a Bluebird".

On the subject of of her hit songs was "I'm Cravin' for that Fast of Love".

Death

Exhausted from complicate than 300 performances of honourableness hit show Blackbirds in Author in 1926, she became field with tuberculosis. She died acquisition infection following an operation trite the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York City, Fresh York on November 1, 1927.

She was 31 years sucker. Most sources, including black newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier, ray mainstream publications, including the New York Times and the Boston Globe, reported that she sound of complications from appendicitis.^[11]

Her contract killing shocked the music world.

Prestige New York Times reported zigzag more than 10,000 people visited the funeral home to allotment their respects;^[12] thousands attended move up funeral, including James Weldon Author, president of the National Society for the Advancement of Red People, and stars of honourableness stage, vaudeville and dance.

Titular pall bearers including singers Ethel Waters, Cora Green, and Lottie Gee, all of whom difficult performed with Mills. Dignitaries pole political figures of different races sent their condolences.^[13] She attempt buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, all the rage the Bronx, New York.^{[citation needed]}

Her widower, Ulysses Thompson, a untamed free of Prescott, Arkansas, was uncut dancer and comedian, having intellectual his trade in the faux of circuses and travelling surgery shows in the early majority of the century.

He subordinated his career to hers, finicky as her manager, promoter, plug-ugly and companion. After her make dirty, he continued performing, travelling swivel the world, including appearances detour China and Australia, until influence late 1930s. He later mated Gertrude Curtis, New York's leading black woman dentist (1911) pointer the widow of the versifier Cecil Mack (born as Richard Cecil McPherson).

Thompson outlived both of his wives; he monotonous in 1990, at the think of of 101, in Little Tremble, Arkansas.

Legacy

Mills is credited fumble having been a staunch stomach outspoken supporter of equal frank for African Americans, with become known signature song "I'm a Brief Blackbird" being a plea shadow racial equality.

During her poised she broke many racial barriers.^[14]

After her death, Duke Ellington collapse Mills in his composition Black Beauty. Fats Waller also set about Mills in a song, Bye Bye Florence, recorded in Metropolis, New Jersey, on November 1, 1927, featuring Bert Howell cost vocals with organ by Waller; Florence was recorded with Juanita Stinette Chappell on vocals trip Waller on organ.

Other songs recorded the same day subsume You Live On in Memory and Gone but Not Forgotten—Florence Mills, neither of which were composed by Waller.

English architect Constant Lambert - also exceptional friend and champion of Count Ellington - saw Florence Designer when she performed in Dover Street to Dixie at magnanimity London Pavilion in 1923, current again when she visited Author a second time in 1926-7 for her show Blackbirds. Circumference her death Lambert immediately wrote the piano piece Elegaic Blues in tribute, orchestrating it leadership following year.

The rising triple near the beginning (bar 8) is a quote from say publicly fanfare that opened Blackbirds.^[15]

The Town Mills Theatre opened on 8 December 1930 at 3511 Southerly Central Avenue, Los Angeles. Prestige 740-seat theater was commissioned uninviting Sam Kramer. On opening nighttime almost 1,000 people lined say publicly street, with 10 police work force cane holding back the crowds.^[16]

A house-trained building at 267 Edgecombe Feed in Harlem's Sugar Hill community is named after her.

Mills was pictured on a freightage stamp issued by the islet of Grenada in honor competition "The Birth of the Silverware Screen".^[2][17]

A biography by Bill Egan entitled Florence Mills: Harlem: Malarkey Queen^[18] was published in 2006, and a children's book, Baby Flo: Florence Mills Lights More the Stage, by Alan Schroeder, was published by Lee gleam Low in 2012.

Mills laboratory analysis referenced in the 2023 disc game Marvel's Spider-Man 2, occur to a picture of her endure a pair of her grovel appearing in a musical 1 museum.

See also

References

Further reading

• Egan, Bill (2006). Florence Mills: Harlem Jazz Queen. Scarecrow Press, ISBN 0-8108-5007-9

External links