A Snapshot of the Legendary Cotton Club in Its Heyday

Names include Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Joe Louis, Cole Porter, Jimmy Dorsey, Orson Welles, Jimmy Stewart, and scores of others

The legendary Cotton Club was a New York City nightclub from 1923 to 1940. It was located on 142nd Street and Lenox Ave. in Harlem (1923 to 1935), then in the midtown Theater District (1935-1940). The club operated during the era of Prohibition and Jim Crow laws. Black people could not initially patronize the Cotton Club, but the venue featured, and jump-started the careers of, many of the most popular black entertainers of the era, including musicians Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Fats Waller; and vocalists and dancers Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Bill Bojangles Robinson, and Stepin Fetchit. By the Theater District era, there was also a black clientele, including sports greats like boxer Joe Louis.

At its prime, the Cotton Club served as a hip meeting spot, with regular Celebrity Nights on Sundays featuring guests such as Jimmy Durante, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Ethel Merman, Al Jolson, Mae West, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Fannie Brice, Judy Garland, Moss Hart, and Mayor Jimmy Walker, among others.

In the late 1930s, a woman named Edith patronized the club, and she garnered an album full of autographs that constitutes a chronicle of the Cotton Club in those years, and to a degree of New York theatrical society. It is the only signed memento of the Cotton Club that we have ever had, and the most important we have seen.

Black entertainers in the album include musician and orchestra leader Duke Ellington, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (tap dancer and actor, the best known and most highly paid black American entertainer in America during the first half of the twentieth century), singer and bandleader Cab Calloway, actor Stepin Fetchit (the first black actor to have a successful film career), and singer and actress Ethel Waters.

The renowned Cotton Club Dance Director Clarence Robinson has also signed, as has Julian Harrison, who created the interior art in the Cotton Club, who not only signed but included a drawing by him. The signature of Joe Louis, one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time, shows that the club was integrated by this time.

White notables and patrons have also signed. They include bandleaders Jimmy Dorsey (and Ray Noble, his composer and singer), Vincent Lopez, Louis Prima, Ben Berney, Phil Spitalny, and Sammy Kaye; composers Cole Porter, Ted Koehler (with a cartoon featuring a man holding an umbrella singing his “Stormy Weather”, and J. Fred Coots (twith hree bars from his “You Go to My Head”); and actor/director Orson Welles, actors Jimmy Stewart, George Raft, Robert Morley, Franchot Tone, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Phil Regan, Mischa Auer, Benay Venuta (star of Anything Goes and Annie Get Your Gun), Harry Richman, and Jack Oakie; comedians Jimmy Durante, Henny Youngman, Olsen and Johnson. (with a cartoon by Olsen, signed by both), Smith & Dale, Joe Penner, Ben Blue, and Hugh Herbert; actresses Ethel Merman (the undisputed First Lady of the musical comedy stage), Dorothy Lamour (with a lipstick impression of a kiss on the same page), Tallulah Bankhead, Beatrice Lillie, Mitzi Green, Binney Barnes, and Helen Kane (prototype for Betty Boop); Billy Rose, impresario and showman par extraordinaire; Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, the great swing dancing group of the day; sports stars jockeys Eddie Arcaro and Jack Westrope, boxers Jimmy Braddock and Young Corbett III, swimmer and Olympic gold medalist Eleanor Holm, and Monte Pearson (who pitched a no-hitter for the Yankees the year he signed this book); vaudevillians and Ziegfield Follies stars like Blossom Seely-Benny Fields, and John Steel; Alan Roy Dafoe, doctor who delivered the Dionne quintuplets and became a celebrity; and famed newsmen and writers Damon Runyon and George Ross. There are dozens of other names as well.

A rare assemblage from a historically important venue.