From her stage debut in 1922 to her final appearance in 1996, singer Elisabeth Welch (1904-2003) was an important figure in the world of popular music. Born in New York, at the age of nineteen she helped to launch the Charleston in the Broadway show Runnin’ Wild. Throughout the Jazz Age she worked on stage with some of the great names of the Harlem Renaissance, including Josephine Baker and Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson. On Broadway she popularised Cole Porter’s scandalous song “Love for Sale,” and in 1933 she introduced the torch song “Stormy Weather” to British audiences. Also in 1933, with her appearance in Cole Porter’s lavish musical Nymph Errant, Elisabeth began her sixty-year career in English musical theatre.

Elisabeth was a trailblazer for Black women in pre-Windrush Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. At that time, she was the most famous Black woman in Britain and a sophisticated, stylish interpreter of popular songs. The British public were drawn to her beauty and elegance, and her soft, lovely voice. Elisabeth regarded herself as American by birth, but English in thought and interest. London was her home for seventy years.

After making London her home, further career highlights of the 1930s included appearances at the London Palladium and at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (in Ivor Novello’s musical Glamorous Night), as well as many cabaret shows, including a successful run at the Café de Paris, a popular London nightspot. In 1934, when she broadcast for the BBC in Soft Lights and Sweet Music, she became the first Black artiste to have her own radio series in Britain. In 1936 she co-starred with her friend, the great African American singer and political activist Paul Robeson, in the film Song of Freedom. She chastised him for trying to persuade her to make a stand for ‘her people.’ ‘What people? She enquired. ‘I’m African, American Indian, Scots and Irish. I can’t make a stand for all of them. You must excuse me!’

Elisabeth’s love affair with the newspaper editor David Astor ended when his mother, the formidable Tory politician Lady Nancy Astor, expressed strong disapproval with her son’s inter-racial romance.

When the war broke out in 1939, Elisabeth could have returned to the safety of New York, but she decided to remain in her adopted country, and support the British war effort, entertaining the armed forces. During the war she enjoyed one of her biggest successes in the revue Happy and Glorious at the London Palladium.

In the post-war years Elisabeth starred in three sophisticated revues in London’s West End: Tuppence Coloured (1947), in which she sang Edith Piaf’s ‘La Vie En Rose’, Oranges and Lemons (1949), and Penny Plain (1951). In 1970 she began a long succession of one-woman shows with A Marvellous Party at the Hampstead Theatre Club and in 1979 her appearance in Derek Jarman’s film of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (singing ‘Stormy Weather’) won her new fans. At the age of eighty-one she returned to the Broadway stage, and her performance in Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood earned her a nomination for a Tony award. It was a triumphant homecoming.

The crowning achievement of her long and illustrious career was the 1992 all-star tribute concert, A Time to Start Living: A Celebration of the Great Elisabeth Welch, a World Aids Day Gala at the Lyric Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. This gala featured the cream of British show business, including Cleo Laine, John Dankworth, Petula Clark, and Ned Sherrin. They joined the audience to give her an unprecedented (as far as anyone there could remember) five standing ovations.

Elisabeth did not fit the definition of jazz, torch, pop, or ballad singer but defined her art quite simply as ‘telling a story in song’.

Soft Lights and Sweet Music: Photographs of Elisabeth Welch at the National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery recently acquired a group of vintage prints of Elisabeth Welch from her biographer Stephen Bourne. These photographs were taken in New York and London in the 1930s and 1940s by Carl Van Vechten, Humphrey Spender, Cannons of Hollywood and Paul Tanqueray. The photographs will be displayed in the National Portrait Gallery’s Room 31, together with items from Stephen’s private collection of Elisabeth Welch memorabilia, from 3 March to 13 September 2009.

Stephen Bourne’s Elisabeth Welch: Soft Lights and Sweet Music (Scarecrow Press, £15.99) will be available in the National Portrait Gallery’s Bookshop.