[Vision2020] The Screen Lost an Image and the Blues Lost a Voice

[keely emerinemix]

She was an icon in our house growing up, and one of my best musical memories is listening to Ms. Horne and Harry Belafonte singing "Don't It Make You Wanna Go Home" from what I believe was the only album they recorded together.  She was a breathtakingly beautiful woman inside and out and a hero in all the ways that matter.

Keely
www.keely-prevailingwinds.com




> Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 06:06:50 -0700
> From: thansen at moscow.com
> To: vision2020 at moscow.com
> Subject: [Vision2020] The Screen Lost an Image and the Blues Lost a Voice
> 
> Courtesy of CNN at:
> 
> http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/05/10/obit.lena.horne/index.html?hpt=T2
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------
> 
> Legendary singer, actress Lena Horne dead at 92
> 
> (CNN) -- Singer, dancer and actress Lena Horne died at New
> York-Presbyterian Hospital on Sunday night, a hospital spokeswoman said.
> 
> Horne was 92.
> 
> She was one of the first African-Americans to sign a long-term movie
> contract with a major Hollywood studio when she joined MGM in 1942.
> 
> Horne's expressive voice made her a singing star after Hollywood failed to
> give her roles that might have made her a big screen starlet.
> 
> Horne complained she was used as "window dressing" in white films, mostly
> limited to singing performances that could be easily edited out for play
> in southern theaters.
> 
> The light-complected Horne refused to go along with studio plans to
> promote her as a Latin American.
> 
> She later said she did not want to be "an imitation of a white woman."
> 
> Her childhood was nomadic as she traveled with her actress mother, but
> much of her time growing up was spent in Brooklyn, New York, where she was
> born in 1917.
> 
> Horne was 16 when she began her show business career as a dancer at
> Harlem's Cotton Club. She later became a singer there, playing to packed
> houses of white patrons, with band leaders Cab Calloway and Duke
> Ellington.
> 
> She toured as a featured singer with a white band in 1940, a first for an
> African-American, according to her official biography.
> 
> Her first film role came in 1938 in "The Duke is Tops," but her next movie
> didn't come along for another four years.
> 
> She was given a screen test by MGM and signed to a movie contract after a
> studio scout saw her performing in a New York club.
> 
> "I think the black boy that cleaned the shoes and me were the only two
> black people except the maids who were there working for the stars," Horne
> said in a CNN interview. "And it was very lonely, and I wasn't very
> happy."
> 
> Still, Horne said she was grateful that her World War II-era films --
> including "Cabin in the Sky" and "Stormy Weather" -- were seen by black
> and white soldiers.
> 
> "But after I realized I would only go so far, I went on the stage," Horne
> said.
> 
> With only subservient roles available for a black actress in Hollywood in
> the 1940s, Horne turned to recording top-selling songs.
> 
> Horne said performing for live audiences was what she loved most.
> 
> "I'm always happy when I'm surrounded by people to react and feel and
> touch," she said.
> 
> She has a son and daughter from a first marriage that ended in 1944.
> 
> Horne married again in 1947 to Lennie Hayton, who was then MGM's music
> director.
> 
> She was an active supporter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil
> rights movement. Horne was there when King delivered his "I Have a Dream"
> speech on the Lincoln Memorial steps in 1963.
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------
> 
> "Stormy Weather"
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCG3kJtQBKo
> 
> "Where or When"
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnRSM3dLSTk
> 
> "Moon River"
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCvqTRHGIrg
> 
> Rest well, Lena.
> 
> Tom Hansen
> Moscow, Idaho
> 
> "The Pessimist complains about the wind, the Optimist expects it to change
> and the Realist adjusts his sails."
> 
> - Unknown
> 
> 
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