Lena Horne, the silky-voiced singing legend who shattered Hollywood stereotypes of African Americans on screen in the 1940s as a symbol of glamour whose signature song was "Stormy Weather," died Sunday in New York City. She was 92
Horne died at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, a spokeswoman said. No cause of death was given.
Beginning as a 16-year-old chorus girl at the fabled Cotton Club in Harlem in 1933, Horne launched a more than six-decade career that spanned films, radio, television, recording, nightclubs, concert halls and Broadway.
As a singer, Horne had a voice that jazz critic Don Heckman described in a 1997 profile in The Times as "smooth, almost caressing, with its warm timbre and seductive drawl — honey and bourbon with a teasing trace of lemon."
She was, Heckman wrote, "one of the legendary divas of popular music" — a singer who "belonged in the pantheon of great female artists that includes Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae."
Horne, 80 at the time and cutting a new album, took a different view.
"Oh, pleae," she said. "I'm really not Miss Pretentious. I'm just a survivor. Just being myself."
When Horne first began dancing in the chorus at the Cotton Club — three shows a night, seven nights a week for $25 a week — she did so to help out her financially troubled family during the Depression.
By the time she arrived in Hollywood for a nightclub job in 1941, she had been a vocalist for the Noble Sissle and Charlie Barnet orchestras, had done some recording and was a cabaret sensation at the prestigious Cafe Society Downtown club in New York's Greenwich Village.
She created a similar response, performing at the Little Troc, a small club on the Sunset Strip, where, according to one news account, "she has knocked the movie population bowlegged and is up to her ears in offers."Beauty is Meaningless
a world in a grain of sand
Hold infinity
touches your heart
Make youself a better personhttp://www.pswehateyou.com/talkingshit
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