CHICAGO (AP) - Etta Moten Barnett, a singer and actress who played romantic, sexy figures in movies at a time when most other black actresses were relegated to roles as nannies or maids, has died. She was 102. In 1933’s “Flying Down to Rio,” Barnett was cast as a Brazilian entertainer who sang “The Carioca” while Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced. Her voice caught the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who invited her to sing at his White House birthday party.
The lead in the Broadway show “Zombie” followed, and she ventured into film after the show toured in Los Angeles. She dubbed songs for actresses and sang a ballad in the Busby Berkeley film “Gold Diggers of 1933.” In 1934, Barnett married Claude Barnett, the head of the Associated Negro Press, a wire service for black newspapers. Eight years later, she appeared as Bess in “Porgy and Bess” on Broadway and then toured with the show until 1945.
For you Busby Berkeley fans, she’s the black singer who did the red-hot “Remember My Forgotten Man” number in (I think) Golddiggers of 1933, in addition to singing The Carioca in Flying Down to Rio.
Ironically I was thinking of her for the first time today in years and it wasn’t because of her obituary. I attended a matinee of the play Cooking at the Cookery, a musical biography of Blues great Alberta Hunter (1895-1984) (specifically about her phenomenal comeback in her 80s after leaving the biz for more than 20 years to become a nurse). In the play, Alberta mentioned her admiration and envy of Etta Moten as the first “colored” singer to sing at the White House. (For some reason I thought that distinction belonged to Marian Anderson.)
Ah, how many memories when a lady of her age whose led her life are lost forever? Though I’m a blue eyed blonde I have a good deal of Creek Indian ancestry and have studied their belief system as the old women in my family incorporated them into their nominal Christianity. One Creek belief (probably not exclusive to them) was that your spirit remains on Earth until the last person who can remember you well is dead. When somebody like Etta Moten (or Bessie & Sadie Delany [who supped often with Booker T. Washington] or George Abbott dies I always have a romantic notion of spirits now free to climb the Milky Way. (Think of how many German cabaret stars will be liberated with the passing of Leon Askin , though hopefully not too soon.)
The LA Times gave her a good obit today; it’s not a linkable site, but one excerpt:
George Gershwin had wanted Moten for the original production of “Porgy and Bess” in 1935. “He told me I was Bess, that I had the verve and the looks he wanted,” she once said of Gershwin. But the composer also wanted Bess to be a soprano. “I asked him to transpose it to my range, but he refused,” Moten recalled years later. “He said Bess was ‘a good bad girl,’ which meant she had to be a soprano. I told him a contralto can be good and bad, too.” But Gershwin hired soprano Ann Brown as Bess. After Gershwin died, “Porgy and Bess” was shortened for the return to Broadway production and Moten finally got the role. She played for six months on Broadway before taking it on the road for two years.
Sampiro, you may be thinking about Marian Anderson being denied permission to sing at DAR Constitution Hall and singing at the Lincoln Memorial instead.
. . . Since the White House has been occupied since 1800, I would be surprised if Etta Moten was the first black woman to sing there. First “documented,” perhaps, or the first famous entertainer. . .
Actually the first black woman to sing in the White House was James K. Polk, but that’s a part of history that has yet to be unveiled and if I said more the Freemasons and Illuminati would kill me.