"Lena Horne, whose signature song was "Stormy Weather," was remembered at her funeral on Friday as a shy girl from Brooklyn who fought racism for decades to emerge as a world-class singer and social activist."
"Horne, who died Sunday at 92, was one of the first black performers hired to sing with Charlie Barnet's white orchestra in the early 1940s, playing the Copacabana nightclub in New York City. When she signed with MGM, she was one of the rare black actors to have a contract with a major Hollywood studio."
"In 1943, MGM lent Horne to 20th Century Fox to play the lead role in the all-black movie musical "Stormy Weather." Her rendition of the title song became a major hit reflecting the ups and downs of her life, which included a second marriage to Lennie Hayton, a Jewish musician working for MGM with whom she shared the social pressures of being an interracial couple."
"For years, Horne entertained white audiences with her impressive musical range, from blues and jazz to such Rodgers and Hart songs as "The Lady Is a Tramp" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." But she was often not allowed to socialize with whites, especially in the segregated South."
""I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," she once told an interviewer. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed.""
"Horne plunged into activism after 1945, when she performed at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting in front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear."
*Note: Word is that Horne then staged her show from behind the rear row seats instead of ahead of the front row seats.
"During the two-hour funeral, former New York City Mayor David Dinkins and U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Georgia, also delivered eulogies for a woman who was blacklisted in the 1950s for her activism and unable to perform."
"But she emerged a major cultural figure, capped by her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," which won a special Tony for the fierce passion of her truths in music."
Source: Associated Press, 6:29 p.m. CDT, May 14, 2010.
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