Adelaide Hall

Adelaide Louise Hall, born on October 20, 1901, in Brooklyn, New York, to Elizabeth and William Hall, was an American jazz singer, entertainer, and Broadway performer whose career extended across more than seven decades. Her father, William Hall, taught piano at the Pratt Institute, where Adelaide and her sister Evelyn were also students. Following her father's death on March 23, 1917, and her sister Evelyn's death from pneumonia on March 25, 1920, Hall took on the responsibility of supporting herself and her mother. In 1924, she married Bertram Errol Hicks, a British sailor born in Trinidad and Tobago, who subsequently opened a Harlem club called The Big Apple and served as her business manager.

Hall's Broadway career began in 1921, when she joined the chorus line of Shuffle Along, the musical written by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. She returned to Broadway in 1923 with Runnin' Wild, in which she performed James P. Johnson's "Old-Fashioned Love." In 1925, she toured Europe with the Chocolate Kiddies revue, a production featuring songs by Duke Ellington, with an itinerary that opened in Hamburg, Germany, on May 17, 1925, and concluded in Paris in December of that year. The cast included Sam Wooding and his Orchestra, Lottie Gee, and Rufus Greenlee and Thaddeus Drayton, among others. During her time in Germany, Hall also performed at Berlin's Eldorado Café.

Returning to New York in 1926, Hall appeared in the short-lived Broadway musical My Magnolia, which carried a score by Luckey Roberts and Alex C. Rogers. That same year she was featured in Tan Town Topics, a revue with songs by Fats Waller and Spencer Williams, which opened at Harlem's Lafayette Theatre on April 5 and included Fats Waller, Eddie Rector, and Ralph Cooper among its cast. From October 1926 through September 1927, Hall toured the Theater Owners Booking Association circuit in Desires of 1927, a production conceived by J. Homer Tutt and produced by Irvin C. Miller, in which she was billed as the star soubrette. Her performance in that show included songs, flat-foot dancing, and accompanying herself on the ukulele.

In October 1927, Hall recorded wordless vocals on "Creole Love Call" and "The Blues I Love To Sing" with Duke Ellington and his Orchestra in New York. On November 3, 1927, she recorded "Chicago Stomp Down" with Ellington and The Chicago Footwarmers for Okeh Records. Hall and Ellington also appeared together that year in the touring show Dance Mania, which played the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem beginning November 14 before moving to Philadelphia's Standard Theatre. "Creole Love Call" entered the Billboard song charts at number 29 in 1928. On January 7, 1933, Hall and Ellington recorded "I Must Have That Man" and "Baby."

Hall's Broadway work continued with Blackbirds of 1928, in which she starred alongside Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Tim Moore, and Aida Ward. Her subsequent Broadway credits included the play Magnolia, the musical Buddies, and the revue Blackbirds of 1928, with her stage appearances on Broadway spanning from 1913 to 1957. Among her final Broadway engagements was the musical Jamaica. Throughout her career, Hall performed alongside artists including Art Tatum, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Fela Sowande, Rudy Vallee, and Jools Holland, and recorded as a jazz singer with both Duke Ellington and Fats Waller. A prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance during the early part of her career, she relocated to the United Kingdom in 1938. Hall died on November 7, 1993, and in 2003 she was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's most enduring recording artist, recognized for releasing material across eight consecutive decades.