Saidie Sellyna, an actress, singer and dancer in a publicity photo, circa 1911 by an Unidentified photographer. Photo: The Sullivan Family papers, Anacostia Community Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Savina Martin, Dominga Martin and Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper. UPDATE: Dominga Martin, a member of the Sullivan family who donated this photo to the Smithsonian, tells me that Saidie Sellyna was her cousin and a singer and actress in Russia in the 1920s!
Mildred Hansen Baker, 1937
Prentice Herman Polk, photographer
Gelatin silver print, 8.8”x12.5”
Anacostia Community Museum
Special Collections
©1981 Estate of P.H. Polk and South LightPrentice Herman Polk was born in 1898, in Bessemer, Alabama. He attended Tuskegee Normal and Technical School and dreamed of being a painter. But at that time, Tuskegee did not offer a program in the fine arts. When a photography instructor named C. M. Battey asked for students with an artistic temperament to come see him, Polk arrived in the teacher’s office with drawings in hand. Polk spent three years under Battey’s tutelage.
After his third year at Tuskegee, Polk left school and went to work in the shipyards in Mobile County, Alabama. While working, he enrolled in a correspondence course in photography. He moved to Chicago in the early 1920s, and apprenticed himself to a commercial photographer.
Polk returned to Tuskegee in 1927 and joined the photography department at Tuskegee Institute. In 1939, he became the school’s official photographer, a position he held for forty-five years.
Mildred Hanson Baker, 1937, by Prentice H. Polk (1895-1985). Mr. Polk studied photography at Tuskegee University where he later became the schools official photographer and maintained a studio there from 1939 to the early 1980s.
Cissy Houston, Myrna Smith, Sylvia Shamwell and Estelle Brown of The Sweet Inspirations in London to promote their single “What the World Needs Now” in December 1968. Photo: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
British soul singer Maxine Nightingale, best known in the U.S. for her 1970s hits “Lead Me On” and “Right Back Where We Started From” (which, I must confess, I thought was Toni Tennille when I was a kid!) Ms. Nightingale is still performing today and looks absolutely fantastic.
nypl:
Courtesy of the Library’s Billy Rose Theater Division and their industrious Photography Librarian, we have a treat for today’s Caturday! Picture above is a very accommodating kitty posing with the iconic Eartha Kitt, in full Catwoman regalia.
BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!
You can check out our treasury of vintage images of Catwomen from NYPL’s Billy Rose Theatre Division AND then take a sec and scratch your vote for the most purrfect Catwoman.
Eartha Kitt, in full Catwoman regalia.
Lena Horne was born in Brooklyn, New York, 95 years ago today. In this photo from May 1956, she is trying on a dress - and wearing those saleswomen out…
Photo: William Lovelace/Express/Getty Images.
Fannie Mae Duncan, who owned a cafe and bar called the Cotton Club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, sitting on a bed with a cashbox - and a handgun - counting daily receipts in 1955. Ms. Duncan was born Fannie Mae Bragg on July 5, 1918 in Luther, Oklahoma. She ran her Cotton Club from 1948 to 1975 and hosted such icons as Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday and BB King. She died in 2005. Photo © Lew Tilley via Pikes Peak Library District. Thanks Robin Caldwell for the tip!
Diana Ross owning the runway in “Mahogany,” 1975. Photo: Gianni Lami. Condé Nast Archive/Corbis
Speaking of Marilyn Monroe and the Mocambo in Hollywood. In 1955, Ms. Monroe persuaded the owner of the Mocambo to hire Ella Fitzgerald (the Mocambo did not book Black artists). Ms. Fitzgerald on Ms. Monroe to Ms. magazine in 1972: “I oweMarilyn Monroe a real debt…it was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the ’50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him - and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status - that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman - a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”
Composer, arranger and vocal coach Phil Moore giving singing lessons to a 22-year-old Marilyn Monroe at the legendary West Hollywood nightclub, the Mocambo, in 1949. Ms. Monroe was quoted in Ebony magazine in 1960 as saying, “I will always be grateful to Phil Moore for his patience… he gave me confidence in my own vocal ability and made me realize that people would be willing to listen to me as well as look at me.” Photo: J.R. Eyerman - Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Lena Horne with composer, arranger and vocal coach Phil Moore in July 1949. Moore worked as an arranger for MGM and arranged music for the 1938 film The Duke Is Tops. Moore also helped Horne and Dorothy Dandridge develop their nightclub performances and coached, arranged and/or wrote songs for Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland,Pearl Bailey, Ava Gardner, Diahann Carroll, Johnny Mathis and The Supremes. He died in 1987.
A 1961 Dixie Peach advertisement that appeared in Ebony featuring Eileen Mills, Director “of the glamorous Negro cover girls at New York’s leading agency for colored models.”
