Preface to the 1994 Edition
This third edition of The Cotton Club is inspired by America’s Jazz Heritage, a partnership of the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund and the Smithsonian Institution, a ten-year initiative to research, preserve, and present to the public the history of jazz through exhibitions, performances, events, publications, and educational programs. Over the ten-year span of the partnership, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services (SITES) will circulate at least five exhibitions.
The first exhibition, Beyond Category: The Musical Genius of Duke Ellington, premiered at the Smithsonian Institution in April 1993, opened at the Museum of the City of New York the following October, and is scheduled to visit ten other cities across the country in subsequent years.
The second exhibition, currently in the planning stages and scheduled to open in 1994, celebrates the musical genius of Louis Armstrong and will premiere at the Queens Museum of Art, in the borough of New York City where Armstrong and his wife, Lucille, made their home.
The careers of both men benefited immeasurably from their appearances at the Cotton Club. Ellington’s band was the first at the Cotton Club that was not out of Chicago (the Cotton Club, being mob-run, was partial to bands from mob territory). For Ellington, his Cotton Club residency meant national radio exposure: first, WHW, a small local radio station, began to broadcast a nightly session of Ellington’s music from the Cotton Club, and it was not long before Columbia Broadcasting System was broadcasting the sessions nationally.
Louis Armstrong’s Cotton Club appearance represented a significant crossover to the white audience. Just as his future wife, Lucille Wilson, had been the first dark-skinned Cotton Club Girl, so Louis Armstrong was the first dark-skinned bandleader to appear on the club’s stage. This event was a long time in coming—and indeed did not occur until the club had moved downtown and Armstrong had played every other major New York club featuring Black entertainers. Armstrong was booked for an “early fall” 1939 show; but by the time that show closed and rehearsals had begun for the major fall show, Armstrong was in solid not only with the Cotton Club management but also with Lucille Wilson.
Future exhibitions planned in the America’s Jazz Heritage series will be devoted not to personalities but to styles—Swing, the Origins of the Jazz Orchestra, New Orleans Jazz. They will have less to do with a particular venue than with a particular region. The Cotton Club was not the premier venue for such styles; in fact, its “culture” encouraged musicians like Ellington and Armstrong to play to white tastes—e.g., “jungle rhythms.” It did not encourage improvisation. The Cotton Club was, however, the stage on which the two major “giants of jazz,” among others, were given an opportunity to cross over to the national (white) audience. It was a peculiar institution that segregated African Americans and, at the same time, owed its considerable fame to their special talents.
