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 greatest jazz musicians like Duke Ellington and Artie Shaw.
She lives in New York City and doesn't appear in the public eye any longer. Lena is most well-known for the motion picture Stormy Weather, in which she sung the title song, in the 1940's.
In contrast to how music careers usually start, 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 three-years-old. Her mom Edna Scottron, daughter of an inventor, was an actress with a black theater group and traveled a lot.
Lena's grandmother and grandfather raised her. Though, she was said to have been part of the Black elite, racism still existed. Lena Horne and her friend Paul Robeson set out on an ongoing effort to fight for Civil Rights.
In fact, she took the civil rights movement so seriously to the point of rejecting the offer to perform to a segregated crowd or to a crowd where the black men and women were there only to serve white people.
Even with those serious concerns she still discovered time to turn into 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 brought about 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 titled "The Men In My Life" in the year 1988.
The next year she won a Grammy Life Time Achievement Award to add to her large list of credits of success she mastered in her career.
In her eighties, she continued 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 Of The Year. She also had the chance to sing on an album with Frank Sinatra in the song "Embraceable You".
In 2000, she recorded yet another album to lend her voice to a "Classic Ellington" recording. Lena Horne is a member of the sorority Delta Sigma Theta and has been with the label Blue Note Records since 1995.
If you are new to Lena Horne, you'll be able to listen to her on the web along with the best rock music artists by searching: best or rock music or list of rock music.
