Zaidee Jackson

Zaidee Jackson (December 30, 1897 – December 15, 1970) was an American singer, dancer, and actress who worked across jazz, spiritual, and traditional pop genres, performing in both the United States and Europe over the course of a career that spanned several decades. Born in Augusta, Georgia, to a sharecropping family, Jackson moved with her mother to Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of three. Before entering show business, she worked as a dressmaker and was briefly married in the early 1920s. Around 1923, she joined the Lafayette Players as a chorus girl.

Jackson's early professional work took her across the American South. From late 1924 into early 1925, she traveled through Tennessee and Kentucky with the Andrew S. Bishop Players, an offshoot of the Lafayette Players Company, performing in the play Paid in Full. By mid-1925, she had risen to lead performer in Wilbur Sweatman's Creole Revue, which toured the Eastern Seaboard and Canada.

Her Broadway career began in January 1926 when director David Belasco cast her in Lulu Belle, a melodramatic play featuring a cast of approximately 100 Black and 15 White performers. Jackson played a minor role as a Harlem entertainer in a fictional nightclub called the Elite Grotto. The production opened February 9, 1926, at the Belasco Theatre and ran for 461 performances before closing on May 16. During this period, Jackson was also performing at Harlem's Club Alabam. In late November 1926, she and several Lulu Belle cast members were hired by filmmaker Oscar Micheaux to appear in the film The Spider's Web, which began shooting that winter in Baltimore and was released on January 6, 1927.

Jackson returned to the stage in April 1927 at the Lafayette Theatre, appearing in Desires of 1927, a revue staged and produced by Irvin C. Miller that starred Adelaide Hall. That July, she was cast as Magnolia in Rang Tang, a two-act musical comedy co-produced by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. Set in Madagascar and Harlem, the show featured Miller and Lyles alongside Daniel L. Haynes and Josephine Hall and opened July 12 at the Majestic Theatre, where it ran for 112 performances before closing on October 22.

Following the close of Rang Tang, Jackson departed for Europe at the suggestion of Lawrence Benjamin Brown, who was then touring the continent with Paul Robeson. She sailed from New York to France in November 1927. After performing in Cannes in early 1928, she relocated to London, where she appeared in May Edginton's play Deadlock at the Comedy Theatre, performed on radio, and had engagements at the Piccadilly Hotel and the Cafe Anglais. She recorded four spirituals for the Brunswick label and subsequently signed a recording contract with Parlophone.

Jackson divided her time between London and Paris through 1929, moving in circles that included poet Countee Cullen and dancer Louis Cole. By June 1930, she was featured as a leading performer at the Sheherazade Cabaret in Paris. In early 1933, film director Andrew Buchanan cast her in two short films, I've Got the Wrong Man and Black Magic, made for the Ideal Cine-Magazine, and she recorded numbers from both films for Decca Records. From June to October of that year, she starred in the revue Au Dela... des Reins at Joe Zelli's Chez Les Nudistes in Paris. She subsequently toured Switzerland and the French Riviera over the following two years.

In February 1936, while in Monte Carlo, Jackson met Barbu Neamțu, a wealthy Romanian engineer, and accompanied him to his native Craiova as his companion. She established a singing residency at the Restaurant-Bar Zissu in Bucharest. In October 1937, she returned briefly to the United States, sailing from Cherbourg on the RMS Queen Mary to fulfill a ten-month nightclub engagement in New York and Philadelphia, before going back to Romania in September 1938. She married Neamțu around that time and was granted Romanian citizenship. In November 1938, she appeared at Jimmy Monroe's Swing Club in Paris, and the following month performed in the revue Harlem au Coliseum at the Paris Coliseum alongside The 3 Dukes and Myrtle Watkins, with music by Willie Lewis and His Entertainers.

Jackson returned to Craiova in February 1939 following warnings from the American Embassy in Paris about impending war. She performed regularly on Radio-Bucharest and maintained her residency at Restaurant Zissu, also appearing alongside Jean Moscopol and other Romanian entertainers. A jazz concert she performed at the Romanian Athenaeum in January 1940 drew considerable audience response. Romania's alliance with Nazi Germany left her largely unaffected until the Red Army invasion of August 1944, after which entertainment venues were shut down and she was unable to perform until they reopened following the war's end.

When the Romanian Communist Party came to power in 1948 and nationalized all businesses, Jackson effectively became a state employee. The American Embassy in Bucharest declared her passport void as a result, preventing her from traveling to the United States. In April 1951, her husband and members of his family were arrested as alleged bourgeois spies and imprisoned for four years. Jackson continued to perform during this period but on minimal wages, and she petitioned the US Embassy for the return of her passport, with her sister in New York making parallel efforts on her behalf.

After her husband's release in 1955, Jackson pursued her case through legal channels. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a successful appeal with the Board of Immigration Appeals on her behalf, which ultimately allowed her to return to the United States. She had lived and worked in Romania from 1938 to 1956. Zaidee Jackson died on December 15, 1970, two weeks before her seventy-third birthday.