Adelaide Hall and the Nicholas Brothers February 7, 2008

From 1935, the VitaPhone short “An All-Colored Vaudeville Show” …

• The song playing over the Three Whippets’ acrobatics is “Nagasaki” by Harry Warren and Mort Dixon.

• Adelaide Hall sings and dances the song “To Love You Again”

• The Nicholas Brothers perform in the penultimate spot, which was traditionally the headliner position in vaudeville.

• Eunice Wilson sings “I Don’t Know Why” by Fred E. Ahlert and Roy Turk, accompanied by The Five Racketeers …

• followed by the Racketeers’ rendition of “Tiger Rag” by Edwin B. Edwards and Nick LaRocca.

Adelaide Hall (1901-1993) made her Broadway debut in 1921 in the chorus of Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along, and she costarred with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in Blackbirds of 1928 in which she premiered “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby”.

She married a British sailor, moved to London in 1938 and spent the rest of her like in the U.K., achieving the status of a British Josephine Baker without the latter’s ups and downs. Her final stage appearance was at Carnegie Hall in 1992 at the age of ninety-one, a year before her death.

Technorati tags: An All-Colored Vaudeville Show, Nicholas Brothers, Harold Nicholas, Fayard Nicholas, the Three Whippets, Adelaide Hall, To Love You Again, Nagasaki, Harry Warren, Eunice Wilson, I Don’t Know Why, Fred E. Ahlert, The Five Racketeers, Tiger Rag, Edwin B. Edwards, Nick LaRocca, Vitaphone