Ida Cox  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Ida Cox (c. 25 February 189610 November 1967) was an African American singer and vaudeville performer, best known for her blues performances and recordings.

Cox was born in February, 1896 as Ida Prather in Toccoa, Habersham County, Georgia (Toccoa was in Habersham County, not yet Stephens County at the time), the daughter of Lamax and Susie (Knight) Prather, and grew up in Cedartown, Georgia, singing in the local African Methodist Church choir. She left home to tour with traveling minstrel shows, often appearing in blackface into the 1910s; she married fellow minstrel performer Adler Cox.

By 1920, she was appearing as a headline act at the 81 Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia; another headliner at that time was Jelly Roll Morton.

After the success of Mamie Smith's pioneering 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues", record labels realized there was a demand for recordings of race music. The classic female blues era had begun, and would extend through the 1920s. From 1923 through to 1929, Cox made numerous recordings for Paramount Records, and headlined touring companies, sometimes billed as the "Sepia Mae West", continuing into the 1930s. During the 1920s, she also managed Ida Cox and Her Raisin' Cain Company, her own vaudeville troupe.

Early in the 1930 "Baby Earl Palmer" broke into big time show business as a tap dancer in Cox's Darktown Scandals Review.

In 1939 she appeared at Café Society Downtown, in New York's Greenwich Village, and participated in the historic Carnegie Hall concert, From Spirituals to Swing. That year, she also resumed her recording career with a series of sessions for Vocalion Records and, in 1940, Okeh Records, with groups that at various times included guitarist Charlie Christian, trumpeters Hot Lips Page and Henry "Red" Allen, trombonist J. C. Higginbotham, and Lionel Hampton.

She had spent several years in retirement by 1960, when record producer Chris Albertson persuaded her to make one final recording, an album for Riverside. Her accompanying group comprised Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, pianist Sammy Price, bassist Milt Hinton, and drummer Jo Jones. Ms. Cox referred to the album as her "final statement," and, indeed, it was. She returned to live with her daughter in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she died in 1967.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Ida Cox" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools