Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Florence Mills was born Florence Winfrey on January 25, 1895 in Washington, D.C. and started performing as child. At six she sang duets with her two older sisters and eventually formed a vaudeville act, calling themselves “The Mills Sisters”. The act did well, but eventually her sisters quit performing.

Florence, determined to pursue a career in show business eventually joined Ada Smith, Cora Green, and Carolyn Williams in a group called the “Panama Four” that had some success. Mills stardom came as a result of her role in the successful Broadway musical “Shuffle Along” in 1921, which has been credited with beginning the Harlem Renaissance. She went on to play the Palace Theatre, become an international star with the hit show Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds, with her signature song “I’m A Little Blackbird Looking For A Bluebird”. She became known as the “Queen of Happiness,” for her effervescent stage presence, delicate voice, and winsome, wide-eyed beauty and would be featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair.

By 1926, exhausted from more than 250 performances of the hit show Blackbirds in London in 1926, Florence became ill with tuberculosis and further weakened, passed away of infection following an appendicitis operation on November 1, 1927 at age 32.

Duke Ellington memorialized in his song “Black Beauty” as did Fats Waller with “Bye Bye Florence”, the residential building at 267 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood is named after her and a children’s book, “Baby Flo: Florence Mills Lights Up the Stage” written by Alan Schroeder, will be published by Lee and Low in March 2012.

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