Florence Jones

Florence Emery Jones (1892–1932) was an American jazz singer, dancer, and Broadway performer born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where she spent most of her early years before relocating to New York City to pursue a career in performance. She appeared on Broadway in 1905 in The Mayor of Tokio. In 1920, she immigrated to Paris, where she would build her most significant professional reputation over the following decade.

Jones established herself in Paris at Le Grand Duc, a club operated by Eugene Bullard, where she performed as a singer and dancer and earned considerable renown. Her husband, musician Palmer Jones, worked at the Ambassadeurs club but would join her at Le Grand Duc after three in the morning for occasional joint performances. Poet Langston Hughes, who worked briefly at Le Grand Duc as a cook, described Jones as a figure who deliberately cultivated an air of professional aloofness, noting that she openly snubbed white patrons — behavior Hughes described as unlike anything he had previously witnessed. Hughes also wrote that outside the club, Jones was kind and well regarded by those who worked alongside her. A dispute over the firing of a pregnant waitress led Jones to leave Le Grand Duc, after which she moved to Louis Mitchell's club. Bullard subsequently replaced her with Ada "Bricktop" Smith.

At Mitchell's club, Jones continued to attract attention. In 1924, Mitchell renamed the venue Chez Florence in her honor, and Jones performed there regularly with her husband. The club, located on the Rue Blanche in Montmartre, became one of the most fashionable nightclubs in Paris, drawing high-profile visitors. In 1927, Time magazine published a brief notice acknowledging her beauty and talent, describing her as an expatriate of both hemispheres. Club-goer Ralph Nevill, quoted in Tyler Edward Stovall's Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light, described Chez Florence as crowded from midnight to dawn and noted that Jones made participation in the Charleston a rule of the establishment. Hughes referred to Jones as a "Petite, lovely brown vision, the reigning queen of Montmartre after midnight."

Jones's departure from Paris followed personal losses. Her husband Palmer Jones died in Paris in 1928 of chronic alcoholism. Her daughter Dorothy had remained in New York City throughout Jones's years abroad. Jones returned to the United States and died on January 3, 1932, of heart failure in her New York apartment at the age of 39. It is worth noting that Langston Hughes, in his autobiography The Big Sea, rendered her maiden name "Emery" as "Embry," an error that scholars have frequently repeated.