Snow, Valaida (c. 1903–1956)

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Snow, Valaida (c. 1903–1956)

African-American singer, dancer, and musician, best known of the early female jazz horn players and called the "Queen of the Trumpet," who entertained audiences in North America, Europe and Asia from the '20s to the '50s. Name variations: Valaida Edwards. Pronunciation: Vah-LAY-da. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on June 2, sometime between 1903 and 1909; died in New York City on May 30, 1956, of a cerebral hemorrhage; father was in show business and mother was a versatile musician and music teacher; married Ananias Berry, in 1934; married Earle Edwards, in 1943; no children.

Was performing professionally by age three or four; made her Broadway debut in Chocolate Dandies (1924); toured the Far East with the band of drummer Jack Carter (1926–28); toured Europe, Russia, and the Middle East (1929); co-starred with Ethel Waters as a bandleader and trumpet soloist in Rhapsody in Black (1931); cut her first record, with the Washboard Rhythm Kings (1932); led a group that included Earl Hines at the Grand Terrace Ballroom in Chicago (1933); appeared in London in the musical Blackbirds (1934); moved to Los Angeles, where she began to appearin movies, including Take It from Me, Irresistible You, and the French film L'Alibi (1935); taken prisoner by the Nazis while working in Copenhagen (1941); freed from a concentration camp in a prisoner exchange after 18 months and returned to New York (1943); made her performance comeback, including an appearance at the Apollo Theater (1943); moved back to Los Angeles (1945); played Town Hall in New York (1949); played New York's Palace Theater (1956).

Selected discography:

Hot Snow: Valaida Snow, Queen of the Trumpet, Sings and Swings (Foremothers, Vol. 2. Rosetta Records, RR 1305); Swing is the Thing (World-EMI, SH 354); Jazz Women: A Feminist Retrospective (Stash Records, ST-109); Women in Jazz: Swingtime to Modern (Stash Records, ST-113); Forty Years of Women In Jazz (Jass Records, Jass CD 9/10).

Onstage at the Orpheum, the singer would have her audience enthralled. With her flair for performance, and her supple voice, she would give a lively rendition of "My Heart Belongs To Daddy," in which she would tease, plead and, most of all, swing. After finishing the final verse, she would reach into a pocket hidden in the folds of her full skirt, pull out a trumpet, and launch into a "hot" solo, while the crowd went wild.

So went the desription of trumpet player Clora Bryant , as she regaled attendees at an International Women's Brass Conference with a sampling of what it was like to watch Valaida Snow mesmerize an audience. Snow gave these ingenious demonstrations of her multiple talents in the Los Angeles jazz clubs where she played in the 1940s. According to liner notes written by pianist Mary Lou Williams for Forty Years of Women In Jazz, "Valaida was a great show woman who could walk out and grab the audience," dancing, singing, and playing trumpet, all on the same tune. A female musician playing a brass instrument usually associated with men, she had earned her fame during the Depression, when a woman who worked was often despised for stealing a job from a man. Snow's ability to combine several skills for the price of one not only provided diverting entertainment for her fans during difficult times, but no doubt served as a form of employment insurance.

Born into a musical family in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the early 1900s, Valaida Snow was performing by the age of three or four. Her father was in show business, but it was her mother, a versatile musician and music teacher who had studied at the all-black Howard University, who groomed her children for musical careers. Snow had three sisters—Alvaida, Lavaida , and Hattie —who sang;

Valaida also learned to play cello, guitar, accordion, harp, saxophone, clarinet, bass violin, banjo, and mandolin. But the trumpet was the instrument that captured her imagination; it has been said that she studied for a time with one of the great female trumpet players of the 1920s, Dyer Jones .

In 1920, Snow could be heard playing at the entertainment spots in Philadelphia and Atlantic City. In 1922, she reached New York, where she danced, sang, and played both violin and trumpet in Barron Wilkin's Harlem Cabaret. The 1920s saw a boom in black musical theater, and in 1923, Snow appeared in a musical with vocalist and band leader Blanche Calloway , an older sister of Cab Calloway, and in Will Masten's revue Follow Me. The following year, Snow made her Broadway debut, playing the role of Manda in Chocolate Dandies, a musical by the black composing team of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, with a cast that included the legendary Josephine Baker .

In 1926, Snow toured in England, then traveled to Shanghai, where she danced, sang and played trumpet as a specialty act in drummer Jack Carter's band. She stayed in China until 1928, recognized by then as an international celebrity (eventually she would speak seven languages and enjoy fame on three continents). After a brief return to the States, she traveled to Paris to play in Lew Leslie's Blackbirds, a popular black musical that was often revamped and gave a start to a number of African-American performers, including vocalists Nina Mae McKinney and Florence Mills .

Snow toured Russia, the Middle East and Europe before returning again to the U.S., where she co-starred with Ethel Waters in another Lew Leslie extravaganza, Rhapsody in Black, in 1931. At one point in the program, she served as band leader, directing Pike Davis' Continental Orchestra; she also performed a stunning trumpet solo on George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." On October 5, 1932, she played her first recording date with the Washboard Rhythm Kings, a group that included clarinet and saxophone player Ben Smith. In the course of her career she would record more than 50 songs, mostly on European labels.

In 1933, Snow played in Chicago at the Grand Terrace Ballroom with the orchestra of the great jazz pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines, and later toured with the band for a year. Hines had been a fan of Snow's since the late '20s, and was especially fond of a dance number in which she stepped in and out of several pairs of shoes, doing the steps appropriate to each type of footwear, from ballet to clog dancing to soft shoe.

Mary Lou Williams">
I always liked her trumpet playing. She was hitting high C just like Louis Armstrong.
—Mary Lou Williams

Any consideration of Snow's career must include reference to the historical difficulties faced by women who played brass instruments, such as trumpet. Hattie Gossett and Caroline Johnson , in their article "jazzwomen: they're mostly singers and piano players only a horn player or two hardly any drummers," traced the origins of such discrimination against women who played the "power instruments" in jazz to both African and European origins. Snow has sometimes been criticized for perpetuating the myth of the female musician as a novelty, but had she concentrated solely on playing her trumpet, it is unlikely that she could have attained even a fraction of her success. Despite the "novelty" aspect of her performances, her musicianship on the trumpet was highly acclaimed by the great jazz musicians of her time, including one whose influence touched trumpet players from that era to decades beyond, Louis Armstrong.

Although popular with black audiences in the U.S., Snow, like many African-American performers, found greater opportunities to perform and record abroad. She traveled to Europe six times during her career, sometimes staying for extended intervals, and became known there as "Queen of the Trumpet" and "Little Louis." She also played in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing (Peking), Burma (now Myanmar), Tokyo, Bombay and Cairo, performing the first live jazz ever heard in some of these locations. In Black Women in American Bands and Orchestras, D. Antoinette Handy suggested that Snow may have been as important an American "jazz ambassador" as the musicians Coleman Hawkins, Fats Waller, Bill Coleman, and Benny Carter who were traditionally awarded this title.

While starring in Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1934 in England, Snow married Ananias Berry, her partner in some of the song and dance acts. (The marriage would later end.) That same year, she became one of the first artists to play the Apollo Theater in New York, only a month after it opened, with a group called The Twelve Syncopators. In 1935, she moved to Los Angeles and appeared in the film Take It from Me, then returned to New York the following year to headline again at the Apollo.

Also in 1936, Snow returned to Europe, where she appeared in Paris with Maurice Chevalier, the popular French singer and film star, and made the first of two French films, a mystery entitled L'Alibi. For the next five years, she remained based in Sweden and France, recording more than 40 records in London, Stockholm, and Copenhagen, often performing the vocals as well as trumpet solos. In 1939, she made her second French movie, Piéges, before heeding the warning to depart along with other Americans because of the impending invasion by the Nazis. In 1941, Snow was performing in Copenhagen when leaflets dropped from airplanes filled the streets, announcing that Denmark was now claimed by Germany. She was captured by Nazis at bayonet point as she tried to leave the country. All her possessions, including clothing, jewelry and a golden trumpet given to her at a command performance before Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, were confiscated, and she was interned in the Wester-Faengle concentration camp. In the brutal encampment, Snow was reduced to near starvation on a diet that included little more than potatoes. In 1956, Harrison Smith reported in an article for RecordResearch that "prisoners were given 15 lashes by whip each week." Snow once received a severe gash on her head for using her own body to protect a young girl who was being severely beaten.

She remained a prisoner of war for 18 months and would certainly have died had she not been released in a prisoner exchange. Most likely, she was chosen for this liberation because someone with the power to make such a decision was a fan. She returned to New York by ship in 1943, weak and in ill health, only to find that her mother had died after hearing a rumor that her daughter had been killed overseas.

That year, Snow married Earle Edwards, a former performer who supported her in regaining her physical and mental health. When she began to perform again, Edwards became her new manager. She fronted the Sunset Royal Band for a road show, touring military bases stateside and playing another engagement at the Apollo.

In 1944, Snow performed in the movie Irresistible You. The following year, she was settled in Los Angeles, where she became popular on the local theater circuit, played many of the Central Avenue venues that were home to a burgeoning black jazz scene in the 1940s, and was heard at the Orpheum by the younger Clora Bryant. Sometimes Snow performed with her sister Lavaida, a successful vocalist. In 1945, Valaida played in a show with Los Angeles trombonist and arranger Melba Liston , who recalled the sad feeling the brilliant trumpet player evoked: "She was so talented, so beautiful, and so sweet. But she was so unhappy. She was like hurt all the time." According to others who had known Snow before the war, she never fully recovered from the horrors she had witnessed and experienced in the concentration camp.

Snow continued to tour the U.S. and Canada. In 1949, she starred in a Town Hall concert in New York, billed as a "dramatic contralto" and backed by an all-male choir, singing spirituals and songs by Harold Arlen and George Gershwin. In the early 1950s, she made several recordings, including a group of tunes with the orchestra of tenor sax player, arranger and composer Jimmy Mundy. Her last engagement was at New York's Palace Theater, where she performed a heavy schedule of three shows daily. At the close of the engagement, she suffered a stroke. Snow was in bed for three weeks before she was taken to a hospital, where she died of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 30, 1956. Her exact age was not known, but she was under 60.

sources:

Bogle, Donald. Brown Sugar: Eighty Years of America's Black Female Superstars. NY: Da Capo, 1980.

Bryant, Clora. "The History of Women in Jazz" lecture, given at the International Women's Brass Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, May 31, 1993.

Chilton, John. Who's Who of Jazz: Storyville to Swing Street. Time-Life Records Special Edition, 1978.

Dahl, Linda. Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen. NY: Limelight, 1989.

Driggs, Frank. Women in Jazz. NY: Stash Records, 1977.

Gossett, Hattie, and Caroline Johnson. "jazzwomen: they're mostly singers and piano players only a horn player or two hardly any drummers," in Heresies. Vol. 3, no. 2, issue 10, 1980.

Handy, D. Antoinette. Black Women in American Bands and Orchestras. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1981.

Leder, Jan. Women in Jazz: A Discography of Instrumentalists, 1913–1968. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Peretti, Burton W. The Creation of Jazz. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Placksin, Sally. Jazzwomen, 1900 to the Present. London: Pluto Press, 1985 (also published as American Women in Jazz, Wideview, 1982).

Reed, Tom. The Black Music History of Los Angeles—Its Roots. Los Angeles, CA: Black Accent on LA Press, 1992.

Reitz, Rosetta. Liner notes from Hot Snow: Valaida Snow, Queen of the Trumpet, Sings and Swings. Rosetta Records, RR-1305.

Smith, Harrison. "Valaida's Gone," in Record Research. Vol. 2, no. 12. July–August, 1956.

Williams, Mary Lou. Liner notes from Forty Years of Women in Jazz. Jass Records, Jass CD 9/10.