Artist: Lena Horne Genre(s):
Jazz
Pop
Other
Discography:
You go to my head Year: 2004
Tracks: 23
Stormy Lady Year: 1991
Tracks: 15
Stormy Weather: The Legendary Lena (1941-1958) Year: 1990
Tracks: 22
Jazz Master Year: 1977
Tracks: 16
Singer/actress Lena Horne's primary occupation was nightspot entertaining, a professing she chased successfully around the realness for more than than 60 long time, from the thirties to the nineties. In conjunctive with her clubhouse mold, she as well kept up a recording life history that stretched from 1936 to 2000 and brought her tierce Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989; she appeared in 16 feature of speech films and respective boxershorts between 1938 and 1978; she performed occasionally on Broadway, including in her possess Tony-winning one-woman picture, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music in 1981-1982; and she panax quinquefolius and acted on radio receiver and telecasting. Adding to the challenge of maintaining such a career was her place as an African-American facing discrimination personally and in her professing during a period of tremendous social change in the U.S. Her first job in the mid-thirties was at the Cotton Club, where blacks could perform, just now not be admitted as customers; by 1969, when she acted in the cinema
Death of a Gunfighter, her character's marriage ceremony to a albumen man went unperceived in the script. Horne herself was a polar figure in the ever-changing attitudes around race in the twentieth century; her bourgeoisie fosterage and melodic breeding predisposed her to the popular music of her day, quite than the blue devils and jazz genres more unremarkably associated with African-Americans, and her photogenic looks were sufficiently close to Caucasian that oftentimes she was bucked up to try to "communicate" for white, something she consistently refused to do. But her position in the middle of a social scramble enabled her to become a leader in that struggle, speech production out in favour of racial consolidation and fostering money for civil rights causes. By the end of the c, she could wait back at a aliveness that was never short on conflict, merely that could be seen at last as a triumph.
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was natural June 30, 1917, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Both sides of her fellowship claimed a intermixture of African-Americans, Native Americans, and Caucasians, and both were part of what black leader W.E.B. DuBois called "the gifted tenth," the upper stratum of the American black population made up of bourgeoisie, knowing African-Americans. Her parents, however, power both be described as mavericks from that tradition. Her father, Edwin Fletcher Horne, Jr., worked for the New York State Department of Labor, just one of her biographers describes him more accurately as "a 'numbers' banker": his real profession was play. Her female parent, Edna Louise (Scottron) Horne, aspired to act. The two lived in a Brooklyn brownstone with Horne's agnate grandparents, teacher and newspaper editor in chief Edwin Fletcher Horne, Sr. and his married woman, Cora (Calhoun) Horne, a civic rights militant and early member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded in 1909 and was headed by DuBois. (Indeed, Horne herself could title a like tie. A photograph of her as a two-year-old horse appears on the cover of the October 1919 take of the NAACP's Branch Bulletin, describing her as the organization's youngest fellow member!)
Horne's fatherhood and mother dislocated in August 1920 when she was three, afterwards divorcing. Her father stirred to Seattle ahead finally subsiding in Pittsburgh, where he ran a hotel when he wasn't travelling the state to take care and gamble on sporting events. Horne and her female parent initially remained in her grandparents' household, merely when Horne was around v, her mother left wing to quest for her performing vocation, ab initio with the Lafayette Stock Company in Harlem. Horne recalled in her 1965 autobiography Lena (written with Richard Schickel) that she visited her female parent now and again and even made her stage debut as a lester Willis Young baby in the play Madame X in Philadelphia. After a duet of age, Horne's female parent took her on the road with her, and from the historic period of sixer or seven to the age of 11 she was raised in various locations in the South and the Midwest by her female parent, relatives, and paid companions, with sponsor trips back to Brooklyn. Finally, in early 1929, she returned permanently to her grandparents' household. She stayed there until September 1932, when her granny died, and so went to live with a crime syndicate ally. While attention Girls High School in Brooklyn, she too took dance lessons, fifty-fifty playing with a group at the Harlem Opera House for a workweek in 1933. Her mother, meanwhile, had been living in Cuba, where she had remarried. She returned to New York and rescued her girl. They lived in Brooklyn, then affected to the Bronx, and finally Harlem. Money was sozzled in those Depression age, and Horne's mother obtained an tryout for her at the Cotton Club through a friend. She was hired as a chorus girl at the club at the age of 16.
Lena Horne first-class honours degree attracted aid beyond the chorus when she replaced a ill performer in a performance of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's "As Long As I Live" with Avon Long. Soon after, she american ginseng "Cocktails for Two" with Claude Hopkins & His Orchestra on a dramatic art date with the Cotton Club company, and she began taking telling lessons. She was spotty at the Cotton Club by a theatrical producer and cast in a small persona in the play Dance With Your Gods, which opened a brief course on October 6, 1934, grading her Broadway debut. In 1935, she left the Cotton Club and took a job tattle with Noble Sissle & His Orchestra, billed as Helena Horne. She made her transcription debut with Sissle on March 11, 1936, singing "That's What Love Did to Me" and "I Take to You," both released by Decca Records.
Horne was introduced to Louis Jordan Jones, a Pittsburgh political operative, by her father. In January 1937, she retired from show up business to get married him; their daughter, Gail, was born December 21, 1937. Jones owed his job a shop clerk in the county coroner's office to political patronage. It did not bring in often money, and in 1938, when Horne was approached by an agent with an offer up to co-star in a low-budget all-black moving-picture show musical with a mere ten-day shooting schedule in Hollywood, she recognized. The film was
The Duke Is Tops, released in July 1938. Later in the year, Horne was asked to take on a more time-consuming project, a persona in a new climbing of producer Lew Leslie's all-black musical review Blackbirds. Again, she recognized in the identify of increasing the syndicate income, outgo months in rehearsals and out-of-town tryouts in front Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939 opened on Broadway on February 11, 1939. One of Horne's numbers was "You're So Indifferent," written by Sammy Fain and Mitchell Parish, a song she would go along in her repertory. The usher ran only nine performances, shutting February 18.
Horne returned to Pittsburgh, where she temporarily separated from her married man, then reconciled with him. She began pickings tattle engagements in the homes of flush families in the area. She too became meaning over again, and her son, Edwin Fletcher ("Teddy") Jones, was born in February 1940. That fall, she made a net separation from her husband (they were formally divorced in June 1944) and affected to New York to restart her life history. In December, she recognised an offer up to link the orchestra of white bandleader Charlie Barnet, one of the few instances of integration among drop bands at the time. She made a fistful of recordings with Barnet in January 1941 that were released on RCA Victor's rebate enounce Bluebird Records. After only when a few months, however, the difficulties of encountering racial favouritism spell touring and her desire to make a home where she could raise her children (Jones permit her ingest her daughter, simply ultimately retained custody of her logos) caused her to look for a job in New York, and in March 1941 she began singing at the prestigious club Café Society Downtown in Greenwich Village, one time more billed as Helena Horne. She likewise did wireless work, decorous a regular on the Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street series propagate by NBC. In June 1941, she was the featured vocaliser on a series of recordings made by Henry Levine & the Dixieland Jazz Group of the show for RCA, cutting a option of W.C. Handy tunes for a 78-rpm record album called The Birth of the Blues. She likewise panax quinquefolius on recordings by Artie Shaw and Teddy Wilson (world Health Organization was her accompanist at Café Society).
Lena Horne left her New York employment after six months when she standard an offer to avail opened a order in Los Angeles. She arrived on the West Coast in September 1941 to find that the nine was non so far ready to open; after Pearl Harbor light-emitting diode to American participation in World War II and a famine of building materials, it would non be whatever time presently. In the meanwhile, she was contracted directly to RCA and in December 1941 cut eight songs backed by an orchestra conducted by Lou Bring for her low gear solo album, Moanin' Low. Among its selections were songs she would babble out throughout her life history, including a revivification of the 1933 Cotton Club song "Tempestuous Weather," scripted by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, and George and Ira Gershwin's 1928 standard "The Man I Love." Giving up on the large nine he had in psyche (which was to have been called the Trocadero), Horne's patronise instead opened a small club, the Little Troc, in February 1942 with her as headliner. She attracted attention immediately, notably from the film community, and entertained offers from the picture show studios earlier subsidence on MGM. Even then, she brought in a voice of the NAACP to refer on her contract so that she would non be forced to play the kind of mortifying roles normally minded to African-Americans. As it sour out, however, MGM had selfsame slight else for her to play, and in all simply iI of the 13 features in which she would appear over the following 14 eld, she would only whistle a song or iI, non actually have a oral presentation persona. (The material was gathered together for sound release in 1996 by Turner/Rhino on the CD
Lena Horne at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Ain't It the Truth.) The low gear of these "specialisation" appearances came right away; by May 1942 she was at work prerecording songs for a film adaptation of the Cole Porter musical Panama Hattie, one of which was the banner "Just One of Those Things." At the same time, however, she continued her nightclub wreak, moving from the Little Troc to the Mocambo.
Lena Horne was non credited in
Panama Hattie, and with the film's Latin American circumstance, MGM crataegus laevigata have been hoping to transcend her off as Hispanic kinda than Negro. But her next film would break up whatever such whimsy; it was a handling of the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, with Horne not simply singing but acting opposite Ethel Waters and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson. She crack the film in the later summertime of 1942, and so returned to New York where she was set-aside into the Café Lounge of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel starting on November 26. The engagement attracted national attention, with write-ups in magazines like Time and Life, increasing her emergent stardom. By March 1943, she was punt in Hollywood for what would be her busiest time of filmmaking. MGM loaned her to 20th Century-Fox for some other all-black melodious, a fictionalized photographic film life of dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson called
Stormy Weather, in which she co-starred with Robinson himself and over again american ginseng the title song, which became her touch tune. The gap of
Cabin in the Sky in April launch her on the road making appearances in black theaters like Washington, D.C.'s Howard and Harlem's Apollo. Then it was punt to Hollywood, where MGM speedily began shooting musical sequences with her for one film later some other:
Swing Fever (an insertion of "You're So Indifferent"),
Thousands Cheer (Fats Waller and Andy Razaf's 1929 vocal "Honeysuckle Rose"),
I Dood It ("Jericho"), and
Broadway Rhythm (the 1924 Gershwin touchstone "Person Loves Me"). (Her scenes were unremarkably excised from the prints of the films shown in the South to forefend offending racist white audiences.) Meanwhile,
Stormy Weather opened, and with
I Dood It and
Thousands Cheer out ahead the oddment of the year,
Broadway Rhythm and
Swing Fever undermentioned in early 1944, and
Deuce Girls and a Sailor (in which she panax quinquefolius the Mills Brothers gain "Report Doll") out in April, Horne had appearances in 7 major motion picture musicals released in small more than a year. She would ne'er be so active in photographic film once again. In fact, she would appear in only vII more films over the rest of her life history.
When her picture show work alleviated up, however, Horne had other activities to preserve her officious. She entertained military personnel at military bases; she appeared on wireless, notably the African-American-oriented military show Jubilee and the dramatic play Suspense; she continued to do order and theater of operations dates; and with the lifting of the musicians unification recording bAN that had been imposed in 1942, she was fifty-fifty capable to create a few recordings in November 1944, backed by Horace Henderson & His Orchestra, among them her former understudy "As Long as I Live." (In 2002, Bluebird reissued these tracks and before ones on a CD called
The Young Star, along with a few tracks aforesaid to consume been recorded in January 1944, at a time when the bachelor of Arts in Nursing was tranquil in force.) Back at MGM, her only work was for the anthology film
Ziegfeld Follies, in which she panax quinquefolius and performed Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin's new written strain "Love." The celluloid, long in gestation, did non come forbidden until January 1946. By and then, Horne was working on
Till the Clouds Roll By, a celluloid life story of songwriter Jerome Kern, recording and filming a episode t found her onstage in Show Boat in the purpose of Julie LaVerne, the light-skinned Negro attempting to overhaul for white wHO sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" and "Bill." (Horne's mental process of "Bank bill" was cut from the flick only released on
Lena River Horne at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Ain't It the Truth.)
Horne parted slipway with RCA in 1946 and gestural to the tiny Black & White Records label, for which she recorded that fall down. But when
Public treasury the Clouds Roll By opened in November, MGM took the opportunity to launch its possess record pronounce and release the number one original apparent motion video soundtrack album; featuring Judy Garland, June Allyson, and Tony Martin, along with Horne, the
Public treasury the Clouds Roll By soundtrack reached number ternary in the give of 1947, and MGM Records became Horne's fresh judge. Meanwhile, again unblock of studio responsibilities, she traveled to England to do at the London Casino that spring. She returned to Europe in October 1947 for a lengthier stay that establish her performing in England, France, and Belgium. The European trip besides had some other function; she had become involved in a serious relationship with MGM arranger/conductor Lennie Hayton, simply since Hayton was white, the two could non wed in California, where mixed-race marriages were illegal. Instead, they marital in Paris in December 1947, and even then kept the marriage secret for two and a half years.
As common, Horne had only one photographic film to exploit on in 1948, and that was
Words and Music, a film biography of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart in which she performed "Where or When" and "The Lady Is a Tramp." Opening in December, the film generated a soundtrack record album featuring Garland, Allyson, and Mickey Rooney in addition to Horne that began the first of captain Hicks weeks at number one on February 12, 1949. Five days later, she was recording "Baby, Come Out of the Clouds" for her adjacent specialization visual aspect in an MGM melodious, the Esther Williams picture
Duchess of Idaho. This would be her last film as theatrical role of the seven-year shrink she had gestural in 1942. As the film was released in June 1950, Horne's career took several new turns. That month, unblock of her picture show shrink, she sailed to Europe for another long circuit; she revealed her marriage to Hayton to the press; and her bring up was listed in Red Channels, a publication intended to inform broadcasters of which performers were Communists or Communist "sympathizers." She was not actually called a Communist, simply only included because of her association with others, notably Paul Robeson, and because she had assisted assorted liberal organizations in Hollywood in the forties, chiefly in connection with their civil rights activities. The inclusion of her bring up, however, was enough to damage her life history significantly. No motion-picture show studio offered her some other film shrink; she was without a recording contract; and on that point were no offers to appear on radio or the emerging culture medium of boob tube. Thankfully, she silent had alive appearances to hold on her departure, merely she worked in Europe increasingly over the next respective long time. She came back from Europe in September 1950, and in December opened for the beginning time at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, where she would appear annually for the next decade. There were more European trips in 1952 and 1954.
Eventually, Horne managed to get herself "cleared" from the blacklist, and media opportunities in the U.S. opened up over again. At the end of 1954, she re-signed to RCA, and she was endorse in the recording studio in March 1955 cutting a resurgence of the 1928 Ruth Etting strike "Love Me or Leave Me" to take vantage of the Etting motion picture life history of the same name due for press release that springtime. The recording gave her something she had ne'er had ahead, a hit undivided; it peaked at number 19 in the Billboard chart in July. RCA quickly followed with a full-length LP,
It's Love. Horne began to make appearances on video variety show shows, and she was even invited endorse to MGM to perform in the film
Meet Me in Las Vegas. Of form, all she did was sing a song. The motion picture opened in the winter of 1956, and that year she released more than RCA recordings, toured Europe once again, and, starting on New Year's Eve, opened a long run in the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. RCA brought in recording equipment on February 20, 1957, and the result was the live LP
Lena River Horne at the Waldorf Astoria, released that summertime, which reached the Top 25 in Billboard and the Top Ten in Cash Box and was reported to be the best-selling album by a female creative person on RCA up to that clip.
Marilyn Horne, meanwhile, had stirred her demonstrate to the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood in June, where she recorded a live EP, Lena Horne at the Cocoanut Grove, and proclaimed that she was leaving night club work temporarily. She was preparing to star in a Broadway musical. The testify was Jamaica, with songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, in the first place written as a vehicle for Harry Belafonte, wHO proven unavailable. The creators then rewrote it slightly to beef up the part of the male lead's girl for Horne. Critics were non impressed with the show itself when it opened on October 31, 1957, merely they were impressed with Horne, wHO carried the production to a run of 558 performances that continued until April 11, 1959. Based in New York, she issued plenty of young RCA recordings during this geological period, including an LP called
Stormy Weather; the
Jamaica redact album;
Give the Lady What She Wants (a Top 20 strike in the fall of 1958); a duo album with Belafonte of songs from Porgy and Bess recorded to coincide with the spill of a celluloid version of the Gershwin opera house in 1959; and
Songs by Burke and Van Heusen. Horne disliked the
Scup and Bess LP and even sued RCA to prevent the label from cathartic it, but when it came out it made the Top 15 in Billboard and the Top Ten in Cash Box. It besides earned her her first base Grammy Award nominating address for Best Vocal Performance, Female, though she lost to Ella Fitzgerald.
Finished with her Broadway commitment, Horne went endorse to nightclub ferment in 1959, playacting in Europe that summer and flow and returning to the Sands in Las Vegas. Her schedule was often the same in 1960. That November, RCA once more recorded her in concert for the 1961 record album
Lena River at the Sands, which earned her some other Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal Performance, Female, and another loss, this time to Judy Garland, whose
Judy at Carnegie Hall as well won Album of the Year. Horne ing mounted a stage show, Lena Horne in Her Nine O'Clock Revue, that was intended to go to Broadway just closed taboo of ithiel Town later tryouts in Toronto and New Haven. She continued to record for RCA, charting with
Lena on the Blue Side in April 1962 and
Lena...Lovely and Alive in February 1963 (the latter earning her a third gear Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal Performance, Female, and another loss to Ella Fitzgerald), but diminishing sales lED to the end of her sign up. She sign-language to Charter Records and recorded 2 LPs,
Lena Sings Your Requests and Goes Latin (afterwards reissued as a twofer by DRG Records under the title
Lena Goes Latin & Sings Your Requests), but her increasing employment in the civil rights movement of the early '60s (she appeared with civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, MS, just in front he was assassinated on June 12, 1963, and attended the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on August 28) light-emitting diode her to question her role as an entertainer. She wrote an article for Show magazine called "I Just Want to Be Myself," and it inspired some of her songwriting colleagues to provide her with more than politically oriented material. Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg sent her "Silent Spring," a birdsong that put-upon the cast of address of Rachel Carson's environmentalist holy Writ but treated broader social concerns, and Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green wrote the civil rights-oriented "Now!" to the tune of "Hava Na Gila." Horne premiered both at a Carnegie Hall appearance mounted as a benefit for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where they were heard by a producer at twentieth Century Fox Records, world Health Organization sign her to a new transcription sign up. A unmarried sexual union "Today!" and "Silent Spring" made the lour reaches of the pour down charts in November 1963 and tied made the Top 20 of Cash Box's R&B chart (Hoarding did not publish a split R&B chart at the time), despite resistance from some wireless stations of the Cross of the Cross. Horne followed with a recording of Bob Dylan's civil rights anthem "Blowin' in the Wind" and the 1964 LP
Here's Lena Now! Of course of instruction, in early 1964 the Beatles light-emitting diode the British Invasion, which tended to marginalize middle-of-the-road performers like Horne in American record stores. Nevertheless, she did what she could, turning more than to television, with a special filmed in England in March 1964 and finally shown in the U.S. in December, and more appearances on sort shows. She stirred to some other newfangled record label, United Artists, which released
Feelin' Good and
Lena in Hollywood in 1965 and
Lena Soul and the holiday aggregation
Gay from Lena in 1966. After that, she was without a recording contract for a few long time. She had as well granted up acting in the Nevada showrooms, though she continued to play guild dates. In 1969, she acted in the Western
Death of a Gunfighter, as well vocalizing a song over the opening night and closing credits. That September, NBC transmit her first-class honours degree U.S.-originated tV special,
Monsanto Presents Lena Horne. The same month, she returned to Las Vegas, coming into court with Harry Belafonte at Caesar's Palace. In October, she recorded a new album for Skye Records accompanied by guitar player Gabor Szabo and issued in the give of 1970 under the title
Lena & Gabor. The LP reached the crop up and jazz charts, with a undivided, "Watch What Happens," making the Top 40 of the R&B chart in Cash Box. (Although Horne ne'er considered herself a jazz isaac M. Singer, and jazz critics in agreement, she oftentimes performed and recorded with jazz musicians, and from the seventies on, she, care other traditional pop singers such as Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney, much was lumped in with jazz artists for marketing purposes.) Meanwhile, ABC had contracted with Horne and Belafonte to re-create their stage pretend for TV, and the effect was the special
Plague and Lena, broadcast on March 22, 1970, and recorded for a soundtrack album released by RCA. Buddah Records acquired the
Lena River & Gabor record album and reissued it under the name
Watch What Happens! The label also signed Horne and had her record a new album,
Nature's Baby, released in the give of 1971, on which she covered contemporary pop/rock songs by Elton John, Leon Russell, and Paul McCartney. Unfortunately, by the time the LP came out, she was in no condition to promote it. In a geological period of just now over a year, she had suffered a series of devastating losses. Her father had died at 78 on April 18, 1970; her boy had died of kidney failure at 30 on September 12, 1970; and, out of the blue, her hubby, Lennie Hayton, died of a nitty-gritty attack on April 24, 1971, scarcely as
Nature's Baby was approach out. She was comparatively inactive for a year, simply lastly began to execute once again on a limited base in March 1972. In 1974, she teamed up with Tony Bennett for a distich move that played in Europe and then came to the U.S., starting with a Broadway run at the Minskoff Theatre that played 37 performances betwixt October 30 and November 24. The deuce then toured North America through and through March 1975. She re-signed to RCA yet over again and produced two LPs,
Lena River and Michel, accompanied by Michel Legrand, in 1975 and
Lena River, a New Album in 1976. She continued to hitch in the mid-'70s, playing dates with Vic Damone and with Count Basie & His Orchestra. Meanwhile, her son-in-law, picture show film director Sidney Lumet, married to her girl, Gail, was preparing a moving picture adaptation of The Wiz, the all-black interpretation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that had opened on Broadway in 1975, and he put her as Glinda the Good Witch. She american ginseng "Believe in Yourself" in the plastic film and on the soundtrack album, which reached the Top 40 and went gold upon its release in the fall of 1978. Meanwhile, she had starred in a revitalization of the 1940 musical Pal Joey on the West Coast in the give of 1978, just the usher closed without transferring to Broadway. She continued to make nightclub appearances in the late '70s, only in March 1980 proclaimed her retreat and went on a farewell go that ran from June to August.
Only the 63-year-old isaac Bashevis Singer did not retire. Instead, she mounted a one-person usher that she brought to Broadway. Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music opened at the Nederlander Theatre on May 12, 1981, and was an inst hit. Within a month, she was granted a extra Tony Award marker its success, and the usher played 333 performances, the longest run for a one-person roduction in Broadway history. The double-LP put record book album released by Qwest Records made the bolt down and R&B LP charts, and it last south Korean won her a Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female; it also took the Grammy for Best Cast Show Album. After the evince closed on June 30, 1982, Horne's sixty-fifth birthday, she took it on enlistment about the nation and to London through 1984. At the goal of the yr, she was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors for life accomplishment in the humanist discipline.
Horne performed on occasion during the mid-'80s. In the descend of 1988, Three Cherries Records released her modern album,
The Men in My Life, which made number five-spot in the jazz charts. She was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989. She was less active in the early '90s, but then underwent pacemaker surgery, and in June 1993 she performed a special present devoted to the music of her friend Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington's melodic mate) at the JVC Jazz Festival in New York. She recorded an album based on the usher that was released by Blue Note Records in May 1994 under the title
We'll Be Together Again. It topped the malarky charts and earned her a Grammy nominating address for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, just she lost to Etta James. She appeared on Frank Sinatra's million-selling
Duets II album and was i of the hosts of the 1994 documentary film
That's Entertainment! III, which, like its predecessors, presented some of her forties MGM melodic performances, including ones previously spiritual world. She performed at Carnegie Hall in September 1994 and the same calendar month recorded a raw live record album,
An Evening With Lena Horne, issued by Blue Note in 1995. It reached the Top 20 of the jazz charts and south Korean won her the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. In June 1997, her eightieth birthday was celebrated by a usher at the JVC Jazz Festival and the presentation to her of the Ella Award for Lifetime Achievement in Vocal Artistry. A class afterwards, she released a new Blue Note album,
Existence Myself, which made the Top Ten of the jazz charts. She came extinct of retirement in to record three Billy Strayhorn songs on
Greco-Roman Ellington, a Blue Note album by Sir Simon Rattle released in September 2000.
