The Styrous® Viewfinder: Lena Horn & The Cotton Club

June 30, 2026

Lena Horn & The Cotton Club

Lena Horn - 1947

photographer unknown

Today is the birthday of one of the Great Entertainers in the Pantheon of Gods, Mrs. Lena Horn, who got her start at the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving on to Hollywood and Broadway.

She was a groundbreaking Black American performer who advocated for civil rights and took part in the March on Washington in August 1963. Later she returned to her roots as a nightclub performer and continued to work on television while releasing well-received record albums.

Lena Horn was born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn to Edwin and Edna Horne on June 30, 1917. She belonged to the well-educated upper stratum of Black New Yorkers at the time. She lived the first five years of her life in a brownstone on Macon Street.

Her father, a one-time owner of a hotel and restaurant, was a gambler who left the family when Lena was three years old and moved to an upper-middle-class African-American community in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Edna Louise Scottron, was an actress with a Black theater troupe and traveled extensively. Edna's maternal grandmother, Amelie Louise Ashton, was from modern Senegal. Horne was raised mainly by her paternal grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne. From 1923 to 1927 she lived in a scattered and confusing whirl.

In 1933, Horne joined the chorus line of the Cotton Club in Harlem (New York City), which at this time featured some black performers but a whites-only audience. In the spring of 1934, she had a featured role in the Cotton Club Parade starring Adelaide Hall, who took Lena under her wing. Horne made her first screen appearance as a dancer in the musical short Cab Calloway's Jitterbug Party in 1935. A few years later, she joined the Noble Sissle Orchestra, with which she toured and with whom she made her first records, issued by Decca. After she separated from her first husband, Horne toured with bandleader Charlie Barnet in 1940–41, but disliked the travel and left the band to work at the Café Society in New York. She replaced Dinah Shore as the featured vocalist on NBC's popular jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. The show's resident maestros, Henry Levine and Paul Laval, recorded with Horne in June 1941 for RCA Victor. Horne left the show after only six months when she was hired by former Cafe Trocadero (Los Angeles) manager Felix Young to perform in a Cotton Club-style revue on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

Lena Horn - 1947

photo by Carl Van Vechten

She made her debut at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Panama Hattie (1942) and performed the title song of Stormy Weather (1943) based loosely on the life of Adelaide Hall, for 20th Century Fox, while on loan from MGM. That same year she appeared in Cabin in the Sky with an entirely African-American cast. She was not featured in a leading role because of her ethnicity and the fact that her films were required to be re-edited for showing in cities where theaters would not show films with black performers. As a result, most of Horne's film appearances were stand-alone sequences that had no bearing on the rest of the film, so editing caused no disruption to the storytelling. One number from Cabin in the Sky was cut before release because it was considered too suggestive by the censors: Horne singing Ain't It the Truth while taking a bubble bath.

During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of Black servicemen." Because the US Army refused to allow integrated audiences, she staged her show for a mixed audience of Black US soldiers and white German POWs. Seeing the Black soldiers had been forced to sit in the back seats, she walked off the stage to the first row where the Black troops were seated and performed with the Germans behind her. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt in attempts to pass anti-lynching laws. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt in attempts to pass anti-lynching laws. Tom Lehrer mentions her in his song "National Brotherhood Week" in the line "Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to cheek" referring (wryly) to her and to Sheriff Jim Clark, of Selma, Alabama, who was responsible for a violent attack on civil rights marchers in 1965 mentions her in his song "National Brotherhood Week" in the line "Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to cheek" referring (wryly) to her and to Sheriff Jim Clark, of Selma, Alabama, who was responsible for a violent attack on civil rights marchers in 1965

She was blacklisted during the 1950s for her affiliations in the 1940s with communist-backed groups. She would subsequently disavow communism.

She left Hollywood and headlined at clubs and hotels throughout the US, Canada, and Europe, including the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. From the fifties to the sixties, she appeared in Kraft Music Hall, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dean Martin Show, Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, he Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Sanford and Son, Peggy Lee, Vic Damone, The Bell Telephone Hour, The Judy Garland Show, The Hollywood Palace and The Andy Williams Show.

She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music (link below), which ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway.