The Cotton Club

Abstract

The Cotton Club was a club in New York that opened in the mid-1920s. It was Harlem’s most famous night spot until 1936, when it moved downtown to Broadway. It was never as successful there as it had been in Harlem — part of the excitement was going uptown to hear the music. The Cotton Club was the great center, the sounding board, the place to get exposure for the black artists of that period. It was the making of Duke Ellington, who went there from the Kentucky Club in 1927 when King Oliver turned down the job because the money wasn’t good enough. Duke was there for five years, with a radio remote every night. When he went out to Hollywood in 1930 to make his first movie, Check and Double Check, the management brought in a young singer and dancer by the name of Cab Calloway. It was also the making of Cab. Up and coming songwriters of the day wrote the shows for weekly salaries of $75. The first team was Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh and after them came Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, and later, Rube Bloom. Ethel Waters introduced Stormy Weather at the Cotton Club; Lena Horne started her career there at the age of 16 as a chorus girl. Bill Robinson danced there, as did the Nicholas Brothers, who started there as kids. It was the place for black talent to be seen and heard, but there was an irony about it. The place was run by white gangsters, and, although the club featured all-black entertainment, it was impossible in the earlier years for a customer of darker color to get through the front door. The chorus girls all had to be light-skinned, or “paper-bag brown,” as it was called. The first girl to break this color line was Lucille Wilson, who later became Mrs Louis Armstrong. She was such a sensational dancer that Harold Arlen persuaded the management to bend its rules and hire the dark-skinned entertainer.