Remembering the great singer and actress Lena Horne.
Lena Horne, who would have been 100 years old on Friday, June 30, was only 16 the first time she encountered “Stormy Weather,” the Harold Arlen-Ted Koehler song that would become her signature. A member of the Anna Jones Dancing School ensemble, she danced to the tune first popularized by Ethel Waters on the stage of the Harlem Opera House.
A decade later when she became one of the first actresses to sign a long-term contract with a Hollywood studio, the song became Horne’s when she sang it in the 1943 titular musical. Nearly four decades later, in her long-running 1981 Broadway show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” she was still singing it.
“It’s taken me 40-odd years to feel comfortable with this song,” Horne told audiences of the show.
“My skin has grown around it. No matter where it came from or how I got it, I’m allowed to sing it the way I feel.”
Being able to sing it the way Horne felt and live life on her own terms was among the things that defined the performer and civil rights activist.
By the end of her life, Horne, who died in 2010 at age 92, had amassed such honors as multiple Grammys, a Tony, a Kennedy Center tribute and a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. But it was a career fraught with challenges. The seven-year contract with MGM amounted to less than it promised. It was the rare film such as “Stormy Weather” or Vincente Minnelli’s “Cabin in the Sky” (1943) that allowed Horne to play an actual character. In most films, she was a specialty performer, usually playing herself, a strategy the studio employed to get the films she was in released in the South — by cutting her numbers out.
More disastrous for her movie career, Horne was blacklisted in 1950
Horne became even more politically active in the 1960s, standing shoulder to shoulder with titans of the civil rights movement, including Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr.
after refusing to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee against her friend, singer and actor Paul Robeson.
“I don’t know if Paul was a communist. What’s more, I don’t give a damn,” author James Gavin quoted her telling a reporter in Gavin’s biography “Stormy Weather.” “If he sought my company, I was happy to avail myself. He taught me the culture of my people.”
The blacklist hardly slowed her down. Horne’s singing career started in the 1930s with bandleader Noble Sissle. In 1940, she became the vocalist for Charlie Barnet’s jazz band, leaving after a year to work at New York’s Café Society. Even while under contract to MGM, she recorded and toured. Unable to work in movies or television, she turned to singing in cabarets, where she pushed against the segregation of the day.
“When I was fighting in cabarets for my musicians or something, they’d say, ‘Come on, be with us. Why are you like this? Why are you angry?’ ” Horne recalled in “Lena Horne: In Her Own Voice,” a 1996 documentary. “Well, I was angry. I couldn’t even stay in many of the hotels I performed in, and my musicians couldn’t live in some of the hotels where I stayed.”
Horne’s film career never recovered from the blacklist, but she became a frequent guest on TV variety shows and made her Broadway debut in 1957 in the musical “Jamaica,” scoring a best actress Tony nomination.
Long politically active, Horne became even more so in the 1960s, standing shoulder to shoulder with titans of the civil rights movement, including Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. She nearly retired from show business in the early 1970s, but kept going, reaching a kind of apex well into her 60s with “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music.” Her final album, “Being Myself,” debuted in June 1998, on the cusp of her 81st birthday.
“In one aspect I feel she is America, with all that she had to battle with inside of herself. She was trying to find her identity, just as America was trying to find its identity,” actor and director Clarke Peters (“The Wire”) who recently served as creative director of “Stormy,” a musical on London’s West End about Horne, told the Guardian.
“I grew up watching her, and I saw this very sophisticated lady who was very attractive, but it wasn’t until you look at some of her interviews that you catch the mischievousness in her. She’s not this sweet, demure woman. She’s got a sassiness. It’s her defiance, her coping mechanism in the world.”