Hall was born in Brooklyn, New York and was taught to sing by her father. She began her stage career on Broadway in 1921 in the chorus line of the Broadway musical Shuffle Along, and went on to appear in a number of similar black musical shows, including "Runnin' Wild" on Broadway in 1923, "Chocolate Kiddies" in 1925 (European tour), "My Magnolia" on Broadway in 1926 and in "Desires of 1927" American tour in 1927. At the end 1927 she recorded 'Creole Love Call' and 'The Blues I Love To Sing' with Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. The recording was a hit and catapulted both Adelaide's and Ellington's careers into the mainstream.

In 1928 she starred on Broadway with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in Blackbirds of 1928. The show became the most successful all-black show ever staged on Broadway at that time and made Adelaide and Bojangles into household names. It was this revue that made her name, both in the U.S. and in Europe when the show was taken to Paris to star at the Moulin Rouge in 1929. Her performances in it included the songs "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby", "Diga Diga Doo", and "I Must Have That Man", which continued to be audience favourites throughout her career. [... Read more ]

From Album: "Lee Wiley ~ As Time Goes By"

Lee Wiley (October 9, 1908 – December 11, 1975) was an American jazz singer popular in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. She possessed an attractive, slightly husky tone and delivered lyrics with warmth and intimacy.

Wiley was born in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma. While still in her early teens, Wiley left home to begin a career singing with the Leo Reisman band. Her career was temporarily interrupted by a fall while horse-riding and she suffered temporary blindness, but she recovered and at the age of 19 was back with Reisman again (recording only 3 songs with Reisman, "Take It From Me", "Time On My Hands" and her own composition, "Got The South In My Soul"). She also sang with Paul Whiteman and later, the Casa Loma Orchestra. A collaboration with composer Victor Young resulted in several songs for which Wiley wrote the lyrics, including "Got The South In My Soul" and "Anytime, Anyday, Anywhere", the latter becoming an R&B hit in the 1950s.   Read more…

From Album: "Petula Clark ~ With All My Heart: The Nixa Anthology 1956 - 1959"

Petula Clark, CBE (born 15 November 1932) is an English singer, actress, and composer whose career has spanned seven decades.

Clark's professional career began as an entertainer on BBC Radio during World War II. During the 1960s she became known internationally for her popular upbeat hits, including "Downtown," "I Know a Place," "My Love," "Colour My World," "A Sign of the Times," and "Don't Sleep in the Subway". With more than 70 million records sold worldwide, she is the most successful British female solo recording artist ever and is cited as such in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Clark also holds the distinction of having the longest span on international pop music charts of any British female artist — 55 years, from 1954, when "The Little Shoemaker" made the UK Top 20, to 2009, when her CD Les Indispensables charted in the Top 10 in Belgium.   ~ Read More…

From Album: "Caterina Valente ~ Valente In Swingtime/Love"

Caterina Valente (born 14 January 1931, Paris) is a singer, dancer, and actress. She was born into an Italian artist family; her father Giuseppe was a well-known accordion player, her mother, Maria Valente, a musical clown. She had three siblings, of whom Silvio Francesco was also active in show business.

As a child she worked in the circus as well. She performed in Europe as a singer for several years, but her career as an internationally known vocalist began in 1953 when she joined Kurt Edelhagen's band in Germany. She was soon signed to Polydor and made her recording debut for them the same year. Her first big hits came soon after that. Two songs written for her by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona charted in Europe and eventually England and the U.S. "Malaguena" was her first big hit, followed by "Analucia" which when re-released in an English version as "The Breeze and I" became a top ten hit in both the U.K. ...  Read More...

Official Caterina Valente Web Site

From Album: "Don Cornell ~ Something To Remember Me By [1995]"

Don Cornell (April 21, 1919 – February 23, 2004) was an American singer of the 1940s and 1950s.

Don Cornell is one of the longest and last active singers from the big band era. Still performing at the outset of the 21st century, he is a younger contemporary of Frank Sinatra and Perry Como, and one of the last singing stars of the 1950s pre-rock era who has maintained an active career, for 50 years and counting.

Born Luigi Francisco Valaro, he entered the music business as a teenager, joining the band of trumpet legend Red Nichols as a guitarist. It was when he was 18, however, that Cornell emerged as a singer and a star, as a member of Sammy Kaye's band, Swing and Sway With Sammy Kaye. In 1949, Cornell struck out on his own as a solo singer, following the lead of Sinatra...  Read More...

From Album: "Spike Jones And His City Slickers ~ People Are Funnier Than Anybody!!!!!!!!!"

Lindley Armstrong "Spike" Jones (December 14, 1911 – May 1, 1965) was a popular musician and bandleader specializing in performing satirical arrangements of popular songs. Ballads and classical works receiving the Jones treatment would be punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells and ridiculous vocals. Through the 1940s and early 1950s, the band recorded under the title Spike Jones and his City Slickers and toured the USA and Canada under the title The Musical Depreciation Revue.

Lindley Armstrong Jones was a musical genius. In the wild and woolly days before MTV, digital tape and multi-track recording, Spike Jones put together a top-flight musical organization that the world has not seen the likes of since. Known as the City Slickers, the emphasis was on comedy, primarily doing dead-on satires of popular songs on the hit parade and taking the air out of pompous classical selections as well. Not merely content to do cornball renderings of standard material or trite novelty tunes for comedic effect, Jones’ musical vision encompassed utilizing whistles, bells, gargling, broken glass, and gunshots perfectly timed and wedded to the most musical and unmusical of source points. His stage show was no less mind boggling, needing a full railroad car just to carry the props alone, all presented without electronic gimmickry of any kind, with visuals that would make your eyes pop out of your head. Though he often downplayed his musical achievements (all part of the master plan of selling the idea to the general public), the fact remains that Spike was a strict bandleader and taskmaker, making sure his musicians were precision tight, adept in a variety of musical styles from dixieland to classical, with a caliber of musicianship several notches higher than most big bands of the day who played so-called ’straight’ music.

In other words, Spike was no dummy, he knew what he was doing when he put the whole concept together, checkerboard suits and all. It gave him top 10 hits on phonograph records (it became a badge of honor with pop musicians that you really hadn’t tasted true success until Spike Jones & The City Slickers destroyed your song) and proved immensely popular as a stage show, in movies, and on television. A definite precursor to the video age, Jones didn’t merely play the songs funny, he illustrated them as well, a total audio and visual assault to the senses.   ~ Read more from Wiki

From Album: "Alys Robi ~ L' Anthologie: 1943-1966[REMASTERED]". 

Alice Robitaille (born Quebec City, February 3, 1923) is an internationally-recognized singer from Quebec City, who performed under the stage name Alys Robi.

Born in 1923 in the Quebec City neighbourhood of Saint-Sauveur, Robitaille displayed talent for singing and acting at a very young age. She first performed on-stage at the Capitol Theater at 7. At the same epoch she already sang on-air with the CHRC radio station and was a real phenomenon with the whole city.

At 12 she moved to the Théâtre National, on Montreal's Saint Catherine Street. Under the direction of Rose Ouellet, she learned acting and singing during a 75-week engagement. She continued her career in the Montreal cabarets, making radio appearances. For a time during the war, she also hosted a French radio show named Tambour battant ("Rumbling drum"). Touring Canadian military bases propelled her career across Canada.

During the 1940s, she started producing 78s and she became renowned way beyond Canada. She captured popular imagination with Latin rhythms like Besame Mucho and Tico tico. She sang in chic New York cabarets by the mid forties and in 1947, she travelled to England where she made an appearance on the first regular BBC program.

In 1948, while traveling by car to Hollywood, she was injured in an accident, and entered a period of depression. After a series of unfortunate diagnoses, and a failed romance, she suffered a mental breakdown and was interned for several years in a Quebec City asylum. She was at some point subjected to a lobotomy against her will. She credited the operation with her recovery: "Je me réveillai guérie et j'ai compris plus tard que j'avais été un des rares cas réussis de lobotomie" (I woke up better and later understood that I was one of the rare lobotomy success stories). In 1952, she was released. The same year, she came back on stage at the Casa Loma and the Montmartre, but her efforts were impeded by taboos on mental problems and she never regained the same level of popularity.

In the early 1990s, Alys returned into the public eye after the massive success she had with a song written for her by Alain Morisod ("Laissez-moi encore chanter"). Books, theses, plays and television series were written about her. A movie was released in December 2004: Alys Robi: Ma vie en cinémascope ("Alys Robi: My life on Cinemascope"), entitled Bittersweet Memories in English.    ~ Read more from Wiki

From Album: "Johnny Nash ~ As Time Goes By / The Voice Of Love" (original ABC-Paramount 45 RPM release).

Johnny Nash (born John Lester Nash, Jr., August 19, 1940, Houston, Texas) is an African-American pop singer-songwriter, best known for his unexpected 1972 comeback hit, "I Can See Clearly Now". He was also the first non-Jamaican to record reggae music in Kingston, Jamaica. 

Nash began as a pop singer in the 1950s. He also enjoyed success as an actor early in his career appearing in the screen version of playwright Louis S. Peterson's Take a Giant Step. Nash won a Silver Sail Award for his performance from the Locarno International Film Festival.

Besides "I Can See Clearly Now," Nash recorded several hits in Jamaica, where he travelled in early 1968, as his girlfriend had family links with local TV and radio host and novel writer Neville Willoughby. Nash planned to try breaking the local rocksteady sound in the United States. Willoughby introduced him to a local struggling vocal group, The Wailers. Members Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh introduced him to the local scene. Nash signed all three to an exclusive publishing and recording contract with his JAD label and financed some of their recordings, some with Byron Lee's Dragonaires and some with other local musicians such as Jackie Jackson and Lynn Taitt. None of the Marley and Tosh songs he produced were successful. Only two singles were released at the time: "Bend Down Low" (JAD 1968) and "Reggae on Broadway" (Columbia, 1972), which was recorded in London in 1972 on the same sessions that produced "I Can See Clearly Now." The I Can See Clearly Now album includes four original Marley compositions published by JAD: "Guava Jelly", "Comma Comma", "You Poured Sugar On Me" and the follow-up hit "Stir It Up". "There Are More Questions Than Answers" was a third hit single taken from the album.     ~ Read more from Wiki

From Album: "Tona La Negra, Daniel Santos ~ Boleros Tropicales: 30 Exitos".

Daniel Santos (February 5, 1916 – November 27, 1992) was a singer and composer of boleros, and an overall performer of multiple Caribbean music genres, including guaracha, plena and rumba. Over the course of his career he adopted several names created by the public and became known as "El Jefe" and "El Inquieto Anacobero".   ~ Read more from Wiki

Born into poverty in Puerto Rico, Daniel Santos became one of the most influential singers and songwriters in Latin and South America during the middle of the century. From the pen of Pedro Flores, his early love-lost lyrics -- a series of aching, mostly one-word hits such as "Despedida," "Obsesión," "Irresistible," "Perdón," "Venganza" -- influenced author Gabriel García Márquez as much as other singers, while his later, patriotic material riled American intelligence officers and inspired Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution.

Santos was born in 1916 in Santurce, Puerto Rico. Though he was transplanted from school to the workforce to supplement his family's wages, he later returned to sing in the school choir and also learned English. Still, he was living on his own by the age of 14 and joined the local Trio Lírico for several years. Like many of his countrymen, Santos made the move to New York in the mid-'30s, and impressed Puerto Rican songwriter Pedro Flores with his reading of the maestro's "Amor Perdido."

By 1938, Daniel Santos was performing and recording with the Flores Quartet, with whom he recorded most of his early hits: "Tú Serás Mía," "Venganza," "Esperanza Inútil," "Perdón," "Irresistible," and the definitive version of Flores' best composition, "Despedida." After Miguelito Valdés left Xavier Cugat's Orchestra for a solo career in 1942, Santos hopped from Flores into Cugat's famous orchestra, but soon after, he was drafted to serve in the military.

Santos returned from war with a renewed sense of purpose for his singing career. He began recording and writing patriotic material, working in conjunction with Pedro Ortiz Dávila on "Los Patriotas." Beginning in 1946, he spent much time performing in Cuba and was inspired to write dozens of songs, one of which ("Sierra Maestra") was broadcast by Castro during the Movimiento 26 de Julio. By 1961, however, Santos grew wary of the movement, specifically the policy of training children to fight in the army. He continued performing in the United States as well as Latin America, performing his most famous songs and relating many anecdotes concerning his wild private life (during his early years, he'd reportedly spent time in jails all over the continent). He was living in quiet retirement in Florida at his death from a heart attack in 1992. ~ John Bush, All Music Guide