Lena Horne

Happy Birthday, Lena Horne 1917-2010...Born to upper middle class parents in Brooklyn, N.Y., Horne's mixed race heritage (European American, Native American and African American) gave her exotic beauty and at times held her back in her film career. Her parents separated early in her life and she spent some time traveling with her actress mother and some time with her grandparents. By the time she was 14, she dropped out of high school to try show business herself.

Horne joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club at the age of 16 and, mentored by Adelaide Hall, she soon began singing in the show as well. A few years later she joined Noble Sissle's band recording for the first time under the name of Helena Horne. She got a great deal of notice when she joined Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939 which lead to her being signed with Charlie Barnett's band. Touring with an all-white band gave her first hand experience of the segregation policies of the times and cemented her determination to fight for civil rights. She left the band after a short time and headlined at Cafe Society and the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, becoming the highest paid black entertainer in 1943.

Hollywood came knocking and in 1943 she signed a 7 year contract with MGM. She made two stand-out appearances in the films "Stormy Weather" and "Cabin in the Sky". "Cabin in the Sky" was Vincent Minnelli's first film as a director and in it Horne played a brazen, sexy handmaiden of the devil. One number, "Ain't it the Truth", was cut from the film because watching Horne sing it in a bubble bath was considered too risque. Despite the attention that came with those movies, producers found her difficult to cast. Her light skin made it difficult to cast her in full color films along side popular African American actors but she wasn't "white" enough to be cast with white actors. She also refused to accept parts that stereotyped African American women and for that she was ironically shunned by many black performers. The next films she made would compartmentalize her scenes in movies featuring white actors (mainly of her singing) so they could be easily cut when the films were shown in racially segregated communities.

Horne was an outspoken opponent of segregation and by the end of the 40's she had sued several restaurants and theaters for discrimination. She was also a popular performer for the troupes during WW2 and was up front about her outrage at the way black soldiers were treated. She recalled, "So the U.S.O. got mad and they said, 'You're not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.' So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl." Horne claimed that for this and other reasons, including a friendship with leftist Paul Robeson, she was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and could make no film or television appearances for seven years. Undeterred, she would continue to work for civil rights throughout her life.

Although absent from the screen, Horne found success in nightclub appearances and with recordings. "Lena Horn at the Waldorf-Astoria" was made during her successful 8-week run there and became the best selling album by a female singer in RCA Victor's history. She headlined in clubs and concert halls throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe. In 1958 she became the first African American woman to be nominated for a Tony Award for "Best Actress in a Musical" for her role in "Jamaica", which at her request featured her long time friend Adelaide Hall. When the ban was finally lifted she appeared in only four more films.

For the rest of her career she made countless successful television, club and stage appearances, many of them generating award winning recordings. In 1981, at the age of 64, she won a special Tony award for her one-woman show "Lena Horn: The Lady and Her Music" which still holds the record for the longest running solo performance in Broadway history. In the 1990's she continued to be active in the recording studio, most notably making a recorded tribute to her good friend Billy Strayhorn which featured songs written by him and Duke Ellington. It was Strayhorn whom she credited with being her biggest influence. "I wasn't born a singer," she said,"I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me vocally. He taught me the basics of music because I didn't know anything." Although Strayhorn was openly gay, Horne called him, "The only man I really loved." "He was just everything I wanted in a man except he wasn't interested in me sexually." Her last concert appearances would coincide with the release of that album.

Looking back at her life at the age of 80 Horne said, "My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I'm free. I no longer have to be a "credit". I don't have to be a symbol to anybody; I don't have to be a 'first' to anybody. I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become. I'm me, and I'm like nobody else." Horne died of heart failure on May 9, 2010 at the age of 92.

Teddy Grace

Happy Birthday, Teddy Grace 1905-1992...Born Stella Crowson to a well-to-do family from Arcadia, Louisiana, Grace lived a privileged life even after the death of both of her parents from flu when she was 14. She married early to a wealthy businessman, George Grace, from Montgomery, Alabama and joined the country club set, traveling with her husband on occasional business excursions and tending a spacious home.
Her life probably would have continued in that vein had a friend not heard her singing along to a W.C. Handy tune being broadcast on the radio and dared her to sing it at a country club dance in 1931.

Her soulful rendition of St. Louis Blues caused a sensation. The owner of a local radio station, WSFA, put her on the air the next day where she was a steady performer for a couple of years, moving to the bigger station in Birmingham where she sometimes sang with an orchestra and sometimes accompanied herself on piano or a guitar strung like a ukulele. Her signature song was "Stormy Weather", a song she ironically never got around to recording. From there she joined Al Stanley and his Arcadians for a Gulf Coast tour, ending up in Pensacola, Florida for a month-long engagement.

The touring put a strain on the marriage. Mr. Grace considered her singing "cute" at first and then a nuisance. When Al Katz and his Kittens came looking for a vocalist, Teddy jumped at the chance and left the marriage behind. In 1932 she joined Tommy Christian's orchestra in New York, playing to bigger audiences and catching the attention of Mal Hallet who hired her in 1934. Hallet's orchestra was a popular touring band and Grace's bluesy interpretations added some grit to their white-boy swing. She recorded ten sides with Hallet in 1937 and Warner Brothers produced a short featuring her and the band "teaching" a crash course in "Swinglish".

Decca signed her to record and five of the best musicians around gave her one day for scale which produced  four of her best tracks including "Love Me or Leave Me" and "Crazy Blues". Grace, Frank Froeba, Bobby Hackett, Buster Bailey and Jack Teagarden started drinking early in the day but you can't hear it in the music. The success of those recordings spurred Decca to take another chance a year later and Grace returned to the studio with a slightly larger band but still drawing from the same bluesy material. Recordings with Bob Crosby's band and Bud Freeman's Orchestra would follow but the record companies didn't know what to do with a white woman who sounded black and sang in a style that didn't fit the traditional mold of white female singers. By 1940 she had become disenchanted with the business and withdrew into private life.

It was the tragic death of her nephew in WW2 in 1943 that brought her back into the limelight. She joined the Women's Army Corps and began touring, singing and organizing war-bond drives all over the Southeast. She enlisted stars such as Ozzie and Harriet, Bob Hope and Red Skelton, raising over three hundred million dollars and consistently breaking records for recruitment. She sang at every stop and her schedule was grueling. She shredded her voice and ended up in a Little Rock, Arkansas hospital speechless. Six months later she was able to whisper but she never sang again.

She died in California at the age of 87.

Emmett "Babe" Wallace

Happy Birthday Emmett "Babe" Wallace 1909-2006...A true Renaissance man but largely forgotten today, the handsome Emmett Wallace appeared on stage and screen as a singer, actor and dancer, wrote thousands of songs (many of them covered by Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman and Cab Calloway) a novel, essays and books of poetry and performed on three continents.

At the age of 19 Wallace got a job as a bouncer at the Savoy Ballroom. His skills as a singer and dancer were soon discovered and he began working in some of the famous Harlem nightspots; Small's Paradise, The Cotton Club and the Apollo. When Ella Fitzgerald inherited Chick Webb's orchestra after his death, Wallace helped front the band for a short time. It was only natural that his talent and good looks would lead him to the silver screen.

As an actor, Wallace was one of the early pioneers of black cinema. He appeared in Smash Your Baggage in 1932 and The Black Network in 1936. His career gained momentum in 1943 when he starred with Lena Horne and Bill Robinson in Stormy Weather but like many black American performers, the industry didn't know what to do with him besides place him in "colored" films or cast him as a driver or lowly worker in films made for white audiences.

During WW2 he spent time in France and afterwards, like many African American performers of that era, he made his way to Europe to escape segregation policies in the U.S. He performed on stage in London in "Anna Lucasta" in 1947-1948 and became the first black male star of the Folies Bergere in Paris during 1952-1955 where he sang many of his own compositions in English and in French. In 1956 he moved to Israel where he sang in Hebrew, Yiddish and English and enjoyed a successful recording career. In 1962 he went on tour in Europe again sharing the stage with Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Della Reese, Johnny Otis and Cab Calloway to name a few. At the end of that tour he returned to the States in 1964.

Like many ex-patriot black Americans returning home after long years away, Wallace had been forgotten by the general public. Finding work as an actor or singer was a constant struggle and much of his experience was used as material in his many essays, poems and songs. He found work in a few off Broadway plays and appeared on a television series "Our Street" but from 1966-1970 he was forced by financial circumstances to work as a messenger, elevator operator and mail room clerk for Twentieth Century Fox.

In 1976 he appeared on Broadway in an all black production of Guys and Dolls with Robert Guillaume and James Randolph. After that he spent most of his creative energy on his writing with occasional appearances in community theater and singing in hotel and cabaret engagements. He retired to the Actors Fund Retirement Home in New Jersey where he continued to write up until his death at the age of 97.

Milt Hinton

Happy Birthday Milt Hinton  1910-2000...Those who played with Milt Hinton called him "The Judge" for his  ultimate timekeeping and infectious, rhythmic bass lines. Trumpeter Clark Terry said, "When you work with the Judge, you know your gonna get some time." Over his 70 year career he backed many of the great artists of jazz and is possibly the most recorded jazz musician of all all time.

Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, he spent most of his childhood in Chicago during a time when the Chicago jazz scene included Louis Armstrong, Freddie Keppard and Jelly Roll Morton among other exciting New Orleans jazz musicians who had migrated north to make a name for themselves. His mother bought him a violin and lessons at the age of 13 and Hinton went on to master the tuba and teach himself the bass. He joined violinist and bandleader Eddie South as a bassist at the age of 21, crediting South with teaching him how to play with more feeling.

Cab Calloway picked him up after hearing him play in Chicago which started a 16 year stint with that renowned band. Hinton had to fill the spot (and the over sized uniform) of 6'6" bass player Al Morgan. Hinton recalled his anxiety the first time he had to play Morgan's famous bass solo on "Reefer Man", overcompensating and playing every note he could think of, "the guys [in the band] were laughing...and Cab Calloway was holding his side. When the band came in I was scared to death!" He settled in quickly after that and became the undisputed king of the "slap bass" technique.

Starting in the 50's, Hinton became one of the most recorded bassists in New York. He worked hundreds of sessions with some of the biggest stars of jazz, pop and soul music including Count Basie, Sam Cook, Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday and Bobby Darin. Along with pianist Hank Jones and drummer Osie Johnson he formed the New York Rhythm Section which had the unique ability to enhance any studio arrangement. He was also one of two African-American musicians hired by Jackie Gleason and his 65 piece orchestra and his professionalism and top notch musicianship helped pave the way for other black musicians to break the color barrier in recording sessions. By the end of his career he had played on 1,174 recordings.

He was also a mentor and inspiration to many up and coming young musicians. His strong sense of passing on the tradition was noted by the bassist John Clayton, "He's the kind of person who is always anxious to share." A fine photographer, Hinton also used his camera to record many of the great musicians he played with. His books "Overtime: The Jazz Photographs of Milt Hilton" and his autobiography, "Playing the Changes", are a treasure trove of jazz images, many of them used in Jean Bach's 1995 jazz documentary "A Great Day in Harlem".

Hazel Scott

Happy Birthday, Hazel Scott 1920-1981....Beautiful, talented and an outspoken Civil Rights activist, Scott is another Lost Lady of Jazz. Scott was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad to a musician mother and an absent father. When she was 4 she moved with her mother and grandmother to New York City where her mother eventually found work playing saxophone with Lil Hardin Armstrong. Scott was a child prodigy on piano and benefited by the constant stream of her mother's musician friends, among them Art Tatum, Lester Young and Fats Waller, who spent time socializing in her flat. By the age of 8 Scott was given scholarships to study at Juilliard, by her teens she was playing in jazz bands, performing at Roseland Ballroom with the Count Basie Orchestra and hosting her own radio show on WOR. She made her Broadway debut in the musical revue "Sing Out the News" at the age of 18.

Throughout the 30's and 40's Scott performed in various nightclubs playing blues, jazz, popular music and swinging the classics. Her performances at both the uptown and downtown Cafe' Society clubs brought her both fame and fortune, earning nearly a million dollars a year (in today's dollars)  by 1945. Time magazine reviewed her performances this way, "Where others murder the classics, Hazel Scott merely commits arson. Strange notes creep in, the melody is tortured with hints of boogie-woogie, until finally, happily, Hazel Scott surrenders to her worse nature and beats the keyboard into a rack of bones".

Scott was a spirited young woman with an engaging personality and outspoken politics. She credited her strength to being raised by two outspoken, strong willed, independent women. She was one of the first Black entertainers to refuse to perform before segregated audiences. In her words, "Why would anyone come to hear me, a Negro, and refuse to sit beside someone just like me?" Along with Lena Horne, Scott was one of the first Black artists to be given respectable roles in Hollywood movies. She played herself in several movies including "I Dood It", "Broadway Rhythm", The Heat's On", "Something to Shout About" and "Rhapsody in Blue". During the filming of "The Heat's On" she staged a strike when she learned the black female characters would be wearing demeaning aprons to see their sweethearts off to war. The strike went on for three days and the aprons were eventually removed. The incident would cost Scott her film career.

In 1945 She married the first black congressman from the East Coast, Adam Clayton Powell. As Mike Wallace described the couple, "They were stars, not only in the black world but in the white world. That was extraordinary." In 1950 she was offered the opportunity to be the first black performer to host her own syndicated television show. She was the solo star of the show and performed on the piano and often sung in one of the seven languages she spoke. Her triumph was short-lived as the House Committee on Un-American Activities grew in strength. Her performances at Cafe' Society (considered a hot bed of politically leftist activity) and her outspoken support of the civil rights movement made her a target for the committee. She voluntarily made an appearance before the committee but her outspoken testimony caused her show to be cancelled and future bookings for engagements to become sparse.

Her marriage on the rocks and her career stalled, Scott left for France where she joined the growing black expatriate community. Work in Paris was a struggle and after a 10 year absence, Scott made her way back to the States. When she arrived she discovered that musical tastes had changed and she was no longer remembered. She continued to play small clubs and experiment with expressing herself musically. She died of pancreatic cancer in 1981 at the age of 61.

Cole Porter

Happy Birthday, Cole Porter 1891-1964...Witty, urbane, sophisticated and clever, the music and songs of Cole Porter mirrored the man who wrote them. Born into a wealthy family in Peru, Indiana, Porter was playing the violin and piano by the age of 5. Porter's dominating grandfather wanted him to become an attorney and sent him to expensive private schools in preparation. Porter had his upright piano carted to the schools and found more enjoyment entertaining his friends than in his studies. He did well in school nonetheless, and thrived at Yale where he was the president of the Glee Club and wrote over 300 songs there, some of the fight songs are still used today. Yale's proximity  to New York City was also a draw for Porter, introducing him to the glittering nightlife and excitement of Broadway.

In 1915, Porter's first song to appear on Broadway, "Esmeralda", was sung in the revue Hands Up. His next attempts were failures and in 1916 he spent WW1 in France but how he served has been muddled by both    a lack of records and conflicting accounts by Porter himself. Porter stayed on in Paris after the war where he lived in a luxury apartment and gave lavish, scandalous parties with gay and bi-sexual activity, cross-dressing and recreational drugs. Porter married the wealthy American socialite Linda Lee Thomas in 1919. Although she was very aware that Porter was bi-sexual, the marriage was convenient for both parties. Porter was a supportive, loving companion for her, she was an acceptable heterosexual cover for him  and they both enjoyed their exciting social life and travel. They remained devoted to each other for 34 years until her death in 1954.

The death of Porter's grandfather in 1923 left him with a huge fortune and the couple were able to up their already extravagant lifestyle, renting palaces in Venice for what would today be $54,000 a month and hiring the entire Ballets Russes to perform at a party. All the while Porter continued to write songs and music to minimum or no success. He was about to quit writing altogether when he had his first big success at the age of 36 with the Broadway musical "Paris" in 1928. The show introduced the songs "Let's Misbehave" and the wildly popular "Let's Do It". From there Porter pinned 28 songs for the show "Fifty Million Frenchmen" in 1929 including "You Do Something to Me". His career as a songwriter was finally established. Porter furnished both the music and the lyrics for all of the songs which would become his established method from that point on.

Throughout the 30's Porter continued his successes with the shows The Gay Divorcee in 1932, Anything Goes in 1934, Jubilee in 1935 and Red, Hot and Blue in 1936. Those shows introduced songs that would become standards including "Night and Day", Begin the Beguine", "You're The Top" and "I Get a Kick Out of You". Porter had his greatest success into the 40's with DuBarry was a Lady in 1939, Panama Hattie in 1942 and Kiss Me Kate in 1948 which broke all standing box office records with an unprecedented 1, 077 performances. Porter considered Anything Goes and Kiss Me Kate to be his two most perfect musicals. He would also write for films but his heart and best songs were for the stage. In the 50's, Porter wrote for his last musicals, Can-Can in 1952 and Silk Stockings in 1955 as well as for the films High Society in 1956 and Les Girls in 1957.

In 1939 both of Porter's thighs were severely broken in a horse riding accident. The bones became infected with osteomyelitius, one of the most difficult infections to treat as the bones are very slow to absorb even the most powerful antibiotics. Over the next two decades Porter would undergo a  series of excruciating operations on the bones and nerves of his legs. All the while he was determined not to let the accident diminish his active social and creative life. He continued to attend parties and Broadway openings, carried into the events by his valet. His creative output was never stymied, by evidence of the outpouring of songs for musicals and films that remain standards of American musical theater, jazz, film and popular music.

In 1958 after a long battle and 34 operations, Porter's right leg was amputated. He never wrote another song and lived the remaining 6 years of his life in relative seclusion in his apartment in the Waldorf Towers in New York. His years of drinking and painkillers took their toll as well. He died of kidney failure at the age of 73 in 1964. Although Porter lived the last twenty five years of his life in extreme pain, few but his closest friends were aware of it. Through the creative drive and willpower alone, Porter was able to overcome physical anguish and addiction to produce works that continue to inspire and delight us today.

Jimmie Lunceford

Happy Birthday Jimmie Lunceford 1902-1947...Although Lunceford played several instruments, including the alto saxophone, he was best known as a Big Band leader. He got his start in 1927 when he taught music  at Manassas High School in Memphis, Tennessee where he organized a student jazz band called the Chicksaw Syncopaters. The band began a professional career under the name Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra in 1929 and made it's first recordings that year and again in 1930. The band went on tour, made a few more recordings (that didn't get released until much later) but their real breakthrough came in 1934 when they headlined the Cotton Club with their revue "Cotton Club Parade" featuring Adelaide Hall.

The Cotton Club had already made the careers of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington and Lunceford's band was a perfect fit. Known for their tight musicianship and often outrageous lyrics in their music, the band quickly developed a following with the club's all white audience. Trumpeter Sy Oliver wrote the imaginative arrangements for the band and devised the "Lunceford two-beat" rhythm. The band was known more for it's ensemble work rather than blazing solos. For that reason, even though at the time the band was just as popular as Ellington's or Basie's, many jazz critics now put them on a second tier.

Songs like "Four or Five Times", Rhythm is Our Business", "I'm Nuts About Screwy Music", and "T'ain't What You Do" showcased the vaudevillian antics of the band which often included costumes, skits and sly references to popular white jazz dance bands in their act. They toured Europe in 1937 but a second tour was cancelled when WW2 broke out. They appeared in the film "Blues in the Night" in 1941 but the band had begun to lose the better players due to being underpaid.

In 1947, while playing in Seaside, Oregon, Lunceford collapsed and died of cardiac arrest while signing autographs at the age of 45. It was rumored that he was poisoned by a restaurant owner who was upset that he had to serve African-Americans. Some give credence to that idea considering the rest of the band, who also ate at the restaurant, also became ill. Today, the Jimmie Lunceford Jamboree Festival takes place each July in Memphis, Tennessee in his honor.

Josephine Baker

Happy Birthday Freda Josephine McDonald Baker 1906-1975...Billed as the" Black Venus"," Black Pearl" and the "Creole Goddess", Baker's world-wide celebrity as a singer, dancer and actress and her work for the French Resistance during WW2, American Civil Rights and as an adoptive mother of a multiracial family belies her humble beginnings.

The vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson is listed as her father on her birth certificate but Baker always felt her real father was the German man her mother Carrie was working for in St. Louis at the time she became pregnant. By the age of 8 Baker was working cleaning house and babysitting for wealthy white families to help support her mother, stepfather and three younger siblings. In 1917, Baker witnessed the aftermath of the East St. Louis Riots as thousands of displaced blacks sought refuge in her neighborhood after their homes had been burned by white rioters. The experience would leave a lasting impression and later fuel her involvement with the Civil Rights Movement.

At 13 she married Willie Wells and found work waiting tables in clubs. The marriage lasted two weeks but Baker continued working in the clubs, moving on from waitress to dancer. At 15 she married Willie Baker, taking his name and leaving him shortly after for a chance at dancing in New York. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle were hiring for their groundbreaking show "Shuffle Along" and although she auditioned well, the company would not hire her because she was underage. They took her on as a dresser backstage which gave her the opportunity to learn the routines. She joined the touring company and then the Broadway cast at the age of 16. Her part was of the "caboose", the last dancer in a chorus line which was usually a comic role. She used her long arms and legs and expressive face to great effect and soon was being billed as "the highest paid chorus girl in vaudeville".

In 1925 she joined a new show, "La Revue Negre", which brought jazz and black American performing artists to Paris. Baker performed in the chorus line of "Charleston Babies" and in a partnered dance with Joe Alex called "Danse Sauvage". Baker appeared in nothing but a feathered skirt and her uninhibited, erotic dancing sent the audiences into a frenzy.

After closing in Paris the show went on to tour Europe but Baker, who had thrived in the integrated
Paris society, soon reneged on her contract and joined the Folies Bergeres instead. It was there she unveiled her iconic dance wearing nothing but a skirt made of strung together bananas. Her emergence on the Paris scene coincided with an interest in African art and culture within the artistic and designer community there . Baker's exotic appearance on and off stage made her one of the most photographed women in the world  and by 1927 she earned more than any entertainer in Europe. In 1930 she appeared in two films, "Zou-Zou" and "Princess Tam-tam".

In 1936 she returned to the United States to star in the Zeigfeld Follies. The American audience was not receptive, the reviews were cruel (the New York Times called her a negro wench) and she left the show and returned to Paris deeply disappointed  by the experience. She married Jean Lion in 1937 and became a French citizen and when WW2 broke out, Baker volunteered to spy for her adopted country. While attending parties and traveling to entertain the troupes, Baker collected information she heard for the French Resistance, smuggling the notes and secret messages written in invisible ink on her music sheets or pinning them under her clothing.  After the war, her underground activity earned her the Medal of Resistance with Rosette and she was named a Chevalier of the Legend of Honor by the French Government.

During the 50's Baker took a strong interest in the budding American Civil Rights Movement. She returned to the States to perform, insisting on integrated audiences. When she was refused service at the Stork Club in New York she went on a full-on media blitz denouncing the club and segregation. With her fourth husband she adopted 12 children of different ethnicities, calling her children "The Rainbow Tribe". Baker wanted to prove that "children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers". She often traveled with her entire family and would invite visitors to her chateau to walk the grounds so they could see for themselves how happy and natural the children were.

In the 60's Baker worked with the NAACP and was the only female speaker with Martin Luther King, Jr. on the March on Washington. After King's assassination, Coretta Scott King asked Baker to take her husband's place as leader of the American Civil Rights Movement but she refused, saying her children were "too young to lose their mother".

On April 8, 1975 Baker starred in a retrospective review of her 50 years as a performer at the Bobino in Paris. The show was a stunning success filled with a celebrity star studded audience. Four days later she was found in a coma in her bed surrounded by newspapers filled with glowing reviews of her performance. She died in the hospital on April 12 at the age of 68. Thousands lined the streets to watch her funeral procession. She was the first American-born woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral.

Valaida Snow

Happy Birthday, Valaida Snow 1904-1956....Louis Armstrong called her the world's second best jazz trumpet player besides himself  but today she is one of the Lost Ladies of Jazz. Born in Chattanooga, Tenn. to a vaudeville family, Snow's mother taught her to play a variety of musical instruments so well that by the time she was 15 she was playing the cello, bass, bango, violin, mandolin, harp, accordion, saxophone and, her favorite, the trumpet, on a professional level. She was also an accomplished singer and dancer. At the age of 5 she was playing violin and dancing as "Valaida the Great", the star attraction of the "Picaninny Troubadours", a children's troupe that traveled the south under her parent's direction.

In 1924 she made her New York debut in Sissle and Noble's "Chocolate Dandies" where she would meet her lifelong friend Josephine Baker. 1926 would find her in Chicago, singing and dancing at the Sunset Cafe where Carroll Dickerson's orchestra included her greatest influence, Louis Armstrong, and one of her many lovers, Earl "Fatha" Hines. Snow later said that she would play with Armstrong in the trumpet section of the orchestra on occasion and that he dubbed her "Little Louis", a nickname she would go on to use for promotional purposes.

She joined Jack Carter's group as a trumpeter later in 1926 and began her career of international travel with a two year stint in Shanghai, moving on to Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, Calcutta and other cities in the Far East. She made her debut in Paris in 1929 with Sam Wooding's orchestra finally finding her way back to New York. In 1931 and 1932 she starred with Ethel Waters in Lew Leslie's "Rhapsody in Black" conducting the orchestra in a rendition of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue". In 1934 she appeared in a London production of "Blackbirds" and became the toast of both London and Paris. Her popularity put her in contact with both European nobility and the upper classes where she was welcomed and celebrated. She also recorded for the first time under her own name during that year.

In 1939 she caused a scandal in the U.S. by marrying 19 year on Ananais Berry of the Berry Brothers. She was 35 at the time and the pressure from both Berry's father and the American public sent them both back to Europe after making several films together in Hollywood. The couple performed together in Europe but eventually parted ways.

As WW2 loomed in Europe, Snow was invited to perform in Denmark for the royal family. While visiting she was arrested for possession of drugs for her morphine habit and thrown in a Nazi concentration camp for 18 months. She was released as an exchange prisoner but her experiences had caused her both physical and psychological damage. When she returned to America she weighed just 65 pounds.

She tried to revive her career but the spark and vitality that had made her one of the outstanding performers of the 1930's had gone. Her long absences in Europe and the Far East had also failed to garner her much of an audience in the U.S.  She married producer Earl Edwards and continued to play on occasion. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage after a performance at the Palace Theater in New York just short of her 52nd birthday.

Snow was a phenomenal musician and performer  but because she was a woman in the jazz world of the 30's and 40's she was seen as a curiosity. She had perfect pitch, was skilled at transcribing and arranging and could play trumpet and sing in a wide variety of styles including jump swing, blues, calypso and popular music. She is largely forgotten today but her recording legacy proves her to be at least the equal of many of her male contemporaries.