Adelaide Hall

Adelaide Hall is one of those forgotten singers, prominent between the two World Wars but overlooked in the years that followed. That she was one of the top black singers of her era makes her lack of recognition or representation in the record catalog especially frustrating, It's even more astonishing when one realizes that Hall was the vocalist on Duke Ellington's original 1927 hit recording of "Creole Love Call," introduced the song "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" to the world, and was second in popularity only to Josephine Baker in prewar Paris. Adelaide Hall was born in Brooklyn, NY, sometime between 1895 and 1909 (many biographers presume that the year 1901 is most likely correct), the older of two daughters of William Hall and Elizabeth Gerard. William Hall taught piano at the Pratt Institute, and he started both daughters in music at an early age. Adelaide gravitated toward singing rather than the piano, however, and with her sister Evelyn formed a piano-vocal duet, performing at church and school events. The family was devastated by the death of Evelyn during the influenza epidemic of 1918 -- by then her father had also passed on, and Hall turned her attention to supporting herself and her mother. Her first break came on Broadway in 1921 when she was selected for the chorus of the revue Shuffle Along. In 1923, she was in the cast of the show Runnin' Wild, and the following year she married a merchant seaman from Trinidad named Bert Hicks. During late 1927, Hall found herself booked on the RKO-Keith's theater circuit for a series of shows on the same bill with Duke Ellington. It was during this engagement that she discovered a brand new Ellington tune called "Creole Love Call," which became a celebrated collaboration between the two musical legends -- they...