Lena Horne - The Remasters (All Tracks Remastered) '2021

Tracks list

Tracklist:

01. Frankie and Johnny (Remastered 2019)
02. Someone to Watch Over Me (Remastered)
03. Just One of Those Things (Remastered 2016)
04. Stormy Weather (Remastered 2016)
05. Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered (Remastered 2016)
06. They Didnt Believe Me (Remastered)
07. Id Do Anything (Remastered 2019)
08. Im Through with Love (Remastered)
09. Call Me Darling (Remastered 2019)
10. Love Is the Thing (Remastered 2019)
11. I Wanna Be Loved (Remastered)
12. Its Love (Remastered 2019)
13. Paradise (Remastered)
14. You Dont Have to Know the Language (Remastered 2016)
15. Its Anybodys Spring (Remastered 2016)
16. Baby, Wont You Please Come Home? (Remastered 2016)
17. Just My Luck (Remastered 2016)
18. A Friend of Yours (Remastered 2016)
19. Summertime (Remastered 2016)
20. Sleigh Ride in July (Remastered 2016)
21. Tomorrow Mountain (Remastered 2016)
22. Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend (Remastered 2016)
23. Speak Low (Remastered 2016)
24. Just in Time (Remastered 2016)
25. Get out Of Town (Remastered 2016)


 Read MoreHornes father and mother separated in August 1920 when she was
three, later divorcing. Her father moved to Seattle before eventually settling
in Pittsburgh, where he ran a hotel when he wasnt traveling the country to
attend and gamble on sporting events. Horne and her mother initially remained in
her grandparents home, but when Horne was about five, her mother left to pursue
her acting career, initially with the Lafayette Stock Company in Harlem. Horne
recalled in her 1965 autobiography Lena (written with Richard Schickel) that she
visited her mother occasionally and even made her stage debut as a young child
in the play Madame X in Philadelphia. After a couple of years, Hornes mother
took her on the road with her, and from the age of six or seven to the age of 11
she was raised in various locations in the South and the Midwest by her mother,
relatives, and paid companions, with frequent trips back to Brooklyn. Finally,
in early 1929, she returned permanently to her grandparents home. She stayed
there until September 1932, when her grandmother died, then went to live with a
family friend. While attending Girls High School in Brooklyn, she also took
dancing lessons, even playing with a group at the Harlem Opera House for a week
in 1933. Her mother, meanwhile, had been living in Cuba, where she had
remarried. She returned to New York and reclaimed her daughter. They lived in
Brooklyn, then moved to the Bronx, and eventually Harlem. Money was tight in
those Depression years, and Hornes mother obtained an audition for her at the
Cotton Club through a friend. She was hired as a chorus girl at the club at the
age of 16.

Horne first attracted attention beyond the chorus when she replaced a sick
performer in a performance of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehlers As Long As I Live
with Avon Long. Soon after, she sang Cocktails for Two with Claude Hopkins & His
Orchestra on a theater date with the Cotton Club troupe, and she began taking
singing lessons. She was spotted at the Cotton Club by a theatrical producer and
cast in a small part in the play Dance with Your Gods, which opened a brief run
on October 6, 1934, marking her Broadway debut. In 1935, she left the Cotton
Club and took a job singing with Noble Sissle & His Orchestra, billed as Helena
Horne. She made her recording debut with Sissle on March 11, 1936, singing Thats
What Love Did to Me and I Take to You, both released by Decca Records.

Horne was introduced to Louis Jordan Jones, a Pittsburgh political operative, by
her father. In January 1937, she retired from show business to marry him; their
daughter, Gail, was born December 21, 1937. Jones owed his job as a clerk in the
county coroners office to political patronage. It did not bring in much money,
and in 1938, when Horne was approached by an agent with an offer to co-star in a
low-budget all-black movie musical with a mere ten-day shooting schedule in
Hollywood, she accepted. The film was The Duke Is Tops, released in July 1938.
Later in the year, Horne was asked to take on a more time-consuming project, a
part in a new mounting of producer Lew Leslies all-black musical revue
Blackbirds. Again, she accepted in the name of increasing the family income,
spending months in rehearsals and out-of-town tryouts before Lew Leslies
Blackbirds of 1939 opened on Broadway on February 11, 1939. One of Hornes
numbers was Youre So Indifferent, written by Sammy Fain and Mitchell Parish, a
song she would keep in her repertoire. The show ran only nine performances,
closing February 18.

Horne returned to Pittsburgh, where she temporarily separated from her husband,
then reconciled with him. She began taking singing engagements in the homes of
wealthy families in the area. She also became pregnant again, and her son, Edwin
Fletcher (Teddy) Jones, was born in February 1940. That fall, she made a final
separation from her husband (they were formally divorced in June 1944) and moved
to New York to restart her career. In December, she accepted an offer to join
the orchestra of white bandleader Charlie Barnet, one of the few instances of
integration among swing bands at the time. She made a handful of recordings with
Barnet in January 1941 that were released on RCA Victors discount label Bluebird
Records. After only a few months, however, the difficulties of encountering
racial discrimination while touring and her desire to have a home where she
could raise her children (Jones let her have her daughter, but ultimately
retained custody of her son) caused her to look for a job in New York, and in
March 1941 she began singing at the prestigious nightclub Café Society
Downtown in Greenwich Village, again billed as Helena Horne. She also did radio
work, becoming a regular on the Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street
series broadcast by NBC. In June 1941, she was the featured vocalist on a series
of recordings made by Henry Levine & the Dixieland Jazz Group of the show for
RCA, cutting a selection of W.C. Handy tunes for a 78-rpm album called The Birth
of the Blues. She also sang on recordings by Artie Shaw and Teddy Wilson (who
was her accompanist at Café Society).

Lena Horne at M-G-M: Aint It the TruthHorne left her New York engagement after
six months when she received an offer to help open a club in Los Angeles. She
arrived on the West Coast in September 1941 to find that the club was not yet
ready to open; after Pearl Harbor led to American involvement in World War II
and a shortage of building materials, it would not be any time soon. In the
meantime, she was contracted directly to RCA and in December 1941 cut eight
songs backed by an orchestra conducted by Lou Bring for her first solo album,
Moanin Low. Among its selections were songs she would sing throughout her
career, including a revival of the 1933 Cotton Club song Stormy Weather, written
by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, and George and Ira Gershwins 1928 standard The
Man I Love. Giving up on the large club he had in mind (which was to have been
called the Trocadero), Hornes sponsor instead opened a small club, the Little
Troc, in February 1942 with her as headliner. She attracted attention
immediately, notably from the film community, and entertained offers from the
film studios before settling on MGM. Even then, she brought in a representative
of the NAACP to consult on her contract so that she would not be forced to play
the kind of demeaning roles usually given to African-Americans. As it turned
out, however, MGM had very little else for her to play, and in all but two of
the 13 features in which she would appear over the next 14 years, she would only
sing a song or two, not actually have a speaking part. (The material was
gathered together for audio release in 1996 by Turner/Rhino on the CD Lena Horne
at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Aint It the Truth.) The first of these specialty
appearances came right away; by May 1942 she was at work prerecording songs for
a film adaptation of the Cole Porter musical Panama Hattie, one of which was the
standard Just One of Those Things. At the same time, however, she continued her
nightclub work, moving from the Little Troc to the Mocambo.

Horne was not credited in Panama Hattie, and with the films Latin American
setting, MGM may have been hoping to pass her off as Hispanic rather than Negro.
But her next film would dispel any such notion; it was a treatment of the
all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, with Horne not only singing but acting
opposite Ethel Waters and Eddie Rochester Anderson. She shot the film in the
late summer of 1942, then returned to New York where she was booked into the
Café Lounge of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel starting on November 26. The engagement
attracted national attention, with write-ups in magazines like Time and Life,
increasing her emerging stardom. By March 1943, she was back in Hollywood for
what would be her busiest time of filmmaking. MGM loaned her to 20th Century-Fox
for another all-black musical, a fictionalized film biography of dancer Bill
Bojangles Robinson called Stormy Weather, in which she co-starred with Robinson
himself and again sang the title song, which became her signature tune. The
opening of Cabin in the Sky in April found her on the road making appearances in
black theaters like Washington, D.C.s Howard and Harlems Apollo. Then it was
back to Hollywood, where MGM quickly began shooting musical sequences with her
for one film after another: Swing Fever (an interpolation of Youre So
Indifferent), Thousands Cheer (Fats Waller and Andy Razafs 1929 song Honeysuckle
Rose), I Dood It (Jericho), and Broadway Rhythm (the 1924 Gershwin standard
Somebody Loves Me). (Her scenes were usually excised from the prints of the
films shown in the South to avoid offending racist white audiences.) Meanwhile,
Stormy Weather opened, and with I Dood It and Thousands Cheer out before the end
of the year, Broadway Rhythm and Swing Fever following in early 1944, and Two
Girls and a Sailor (in which she sang the Mills Brothers hit Paper Doll) out in
April, Horne had appearances in seven major movie musicals released in little
more than a year. She would never be so active in film again. In fact, she would
appear in only seven more films over the rest of her career.

The Young StarWhen her film work eased up, however, Horne had other activities
to keep her busy. She entertained troops at military bases; she appeared on
radio, notably the African-American-oriented military show Jubilee and the drama
Suspense; she continued to do club and theater dates; and with the lifting of
the musicians union recording ban that had been imposed in 1942, she was even
able to make a few recordings in November 1944, backed by Horace Henderson & His
Orchestra, among them her old standby As Long as I Live. (In 2002, Bluebird
reissued these tracks and earlier ones on a CD called The Young Star, along with
a few tracks said to have been recorded in January 1944, at a time when the ban
was still in force.) Back at MGM, her only work was for the anthology film
Ziegfeld Follies, in which she sang and performed Ralph Blane and Hugh Martins
newly written song Love. The film, long in gestation, did not come out until
January 1946. By then, Horne was working on Till the Clouds Roll By, a film
biography of songwriter Jerome Kern, recording and filming a sequence that found
her on-stage in Show Boat in the role of Julie LaVerne, the light-skinned Negro
attempting to pass for white who sings Cant Help Lovin Dat Man and Bill. (Hornes
performance of Bill was cut from the film but released on Lena Horne at
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Aint It the Truth.)

Horne parted ways with RCA in 1946 and signed to the tiny Black & White Records
label, for which she recorded that fall. But when Till the Clouds Roll By opened
in November, MGM took the opportunity to launch its own record label and release
the first original motion picture soundtrack album; featuring Judy Garland, June
Allyson, and Tony Martin, along with Horne, the Till the Clouds Roll By
soundtrack reached number three in the spring of 1947, and MGM Records became
Hornes new label. Meanwhile, again free of studio responsibilities, she traveled
to England to perform at the London Casino that spring. She returned to Europe
in October 1947 for a lengthier stay that found her performing in England,
France, and Belgium. The European trip also had another purpose; she had become
involved in a serious relationship with MGM arranger/conductor Lennie Hayton,
but since Hayton was white, the two could not marry in California, where
mixed-race marriages were illegal. Instead, they married in Paris in December
1947, and even then kept the marriage secret for two and a half years.

As usual, Horne had only one film to work on in 1948, and that was Words and
Music, a film biography of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart in which
she performed Where or When and The Lady Is a Tramp. Opening in December, the
film generated a soundtrack album featuring Garland, Allyson, and Mickey Rooney
in addition to Horne that began the first of six weeks at number one on February
12, 1949. Five days later, she was recording Baby, Come Out of the Clouds for
her next specialty appearance in an MGM musical, the Esther Williams picture
Duchess of Idaho. This would be her last film as part of the seven-year contract
she had signed in 1942. As the film was released in June 1950, Hornes career
took several new turns. That month, free of her movie contract, she sailed to
Europe for another long tour; she revealed her marriage to Hayton to the press;
and her name was listed in Red Channels, a publication intended to inform
broadcasters of which performers were Communists or Communist sympathizers. She
was not actually called a Communist, but only included because of her
association with others, notably Paul Robeson, and because she had assisted
various liberal organizations in Hollywood in the 1940s, primarily in connection
with their civil rights activities. The inclusion of her name, however, was
enough to damage her career significantly. No movie studio offered her another
film contract; she was without a recording contract; and there were no offers to
appear on radio or the emerging medium of television. Thankfully, she still had
live appearances to keep her going, but she worked in Europe increasingly over
the next several years. She came back from Europe in September 1950, and in
December opened for the first time at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, where she
would appear annually for the next decade. There were more European trips in
1952 and 1954.

Its LoveEventually, Horne managed to get herself cleared from the blacklist, and
media opportunities in the U.S. opened up again. At the end of 1954, she
re-signed to RCA, and she was back in the recording studio in March 1955 cutting
a revival of the 1928 Ruth Etting hit Love Me or Leave Me to take advantage of
the Etting film biography of the same name due for release that spring. The
recording gave her something she had never had before, a hit single; it peaked
at number 19 in the Billboard chart in July. RCA quickly followed with a
full-length LP, Its Love. Horne began to make appearances on television variety
shows, and she was even invited back to MGM to perform in the film Meet Me in
Las Vegas. Of course, all she did was sing a song. The movie opened in the
winter of 1956, and that year she released more RCA recordings, toured Europe
again, and, starting on New Years Eve, opened a long run in the Empire Room of
the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. RCA brought in recording equipment on
February 20, 1957, and the result was the live LP Lena Horne at the Waldorf
Astoria, released that summer, which reached the Top 25 in Billboard and the Top
Ten in Cash Box and was reported to be the best-selling album by a female artist
on RCA up to that time.

Stormy WeatherHorne, meanwhile, had moved her show to the Cocoanut Grove in
Hollywood in June, where she recorded a live EP, Lena Horne at the Cocoanut
Grove, and announced that she was leaving nightclub work temporarily. She was
preparing to star in a Broadway musical. The show was Jamaica, with songs by
Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, originally written as a vehicle for Harry
Belafonte, who proved unavailable. The creators then rewrote it somewhat to beef
up the part of the male leads girlfriend for Horne. Critics were not impressed
with the show itself when it opened on October 31, 1957, but they were impressed
with Horne, who carried the production to a run of 558 performances that
continued until April 11, 1959. Based in New York, she issued plenty of new RCA
recordings during this period, including an LP called Stormy Weather; the
Jamaica cast album; Give the Lady What She Wants (a Top 20 hit in the fall of
1958); a duet album with Belafonte of songs from Porgy and Bess recorded to
coincide with the release of a film version of the Gershwin opera in 1959; and
Songs by Burke and Van Heusen. Horne disliked the Porgy and Bess LP and even
sued RCA to prevent the label from releasing it, but when it came out it made
the Top 15 in Billboard and the Top Ten in Cash Box. It also earned her her
first Grammy Award nomination for Best Vocal Performance, Female, though she
lost to Ella Fitzgerald.

At the SandsFinished with her Broadway commitment, Horne went back to nightclub
work in 1959, performing in Europe that summer and fall and returning to the
Sands in Las Vegas. Her schedule was much the same in 1960. That November, RCA
again recorded her in concert for the 1961 album Lena at the Sands, which earned
her another Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal Performance, Female, and
another loss, this time to Judy Garland, whose Judy at Carnegie Hall also won
Album of the Year. Horne next mounted a stage show, Lena Horne in Her Nine
OClock Revue, that was intended to go to Broadway but closed out of town after
tryouts in Toronto and New Haven. She continued to record for RCA, charting with
Lena on the Blue Side in April 1962 and Lena...Lovely and Alive in February 1963
(the latter earning her a third Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal
Performance, Female, and another loss to Ella Fitzgerald), but diminishing sales
led to the end of her contract. She signed to Charter Records and recorded two
LPs, Lena Sings Your Requests and Goes Latin (later reissued as a two-fer by DRG
Records under the title Lena Goes Latin & Sings Your Requests), but her
increasing involvement in the civil rights movement of the early 60s (she
appeared with civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, MS, just before he
was assassinated on June 12, 1963, and attended the March on Washington with Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., on August 28) led her to question her role as an
entertainer. She wrote an article for Show magazine called I Just Want to Be
Myself, and it inspired some of her songwriting colleagues to provide her with
more politically oriented material. Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg sent her
Silent Spring, a song that used the title of Rachel Carsons environmentalist
book but treated broader social concerns, and Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and
Adolph Green wrote the civil rights-oriented Now! to the tune of Hava Na Gila.
Horne premiered both at a Carnegie Hall appearance mounted as a benefit for the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where they were heard by a
producer at 20th Century Fox Records, who signed her to a new recording
contract. A single pairing Now! and Silent Spring made the lower reaches of the
pop charts in November 1963 and even made the Top 20 of Cash Boxs R&B chart
(Billboard did not publish a separate R&B chart at the time), despite resistance
from some radio stations. Horne followed with a recording of Bob Dylans civil
rights anthem Blowin in the Wind and the 1964 LP Heres Lena Now!

Lena in HollywoodOf course, in early 1964 the Beatles led the British Invasion,
which tended to marginalize middle-of-the-road performers like Horne in American
record stores. Nevertheless, she did what she could, turning more to television,
with a special filmed in England in March 1964 and eventually shown in the U.S.
in December, and more appearances on variety shows. She moved to another new
record label, United Artists, which released Feelin’ Good in 1965 and
Lena in Hollywood, Soul, and the holiday collection Merry from Lena in 1966.
After that, she was without a recording contract for a few years. She had also
given up performing in the Nevada showrooms, though she continued to play club
dates. In 1969, she acted in the Western Death of a Gunfighter, also singing a
song over the opening and closing credits. That September, NBC broadcast her
first U.S.-originated television special, Monsanto Presents Lena Horne. The same
month, she returned to Las Vegas, appearing with Harry Belafonte at Caesars
Palace. In October, she recorded a new album for Skye Records accompanied by
guitarist Gabor Szabo and issued in the spring of 1970 under the title Lena &
Gabor. The LP reached the pop and jazz charts, with a single, Watch What
Happens, making the Top 40 of the R&B chart in Cash Box. (Although Horne never
considered herself a jazz singer, and jazz critics agreed, she frequently
performed and recorded with jazz musicians, and from the 1970s on, she, like
other traditional pop singers such as Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney, often
was lumped in with jazz artists for marketing purposes.) Meanwhile, ABC had
contracted with Horne and Belafonte to re-create their stage act for TV, and the
result was the special Harry and Lena, broadcast on March 22, 1970, and recorded
for a soundtrack album released by RCA. Buddah Records acquired the Lena & Gabor
album and reissued it under the name Watch What Happens! The label also signed
Horne and had her record a new album, Natures Baby, released in the spring of
1971, on which she covered contemporary pop/rock songs by Elton John, Leon
Russell, and Paul McCartney. Unfortunately, by the time the LP came out, she was
in no condition to promote it. In a period of just over a year, she had suffered
a series of devastating losses. Her father had died at 78 on April 18, 1970; her
son had died of kidney failure at 30 on September 12, 1970; and, unexpectedly,
her husband, Lennie Hayton, died of a heart attack on April 24, 1971, just as
Natures Baby was coming out. She was relatively inactive for a year, but finally
began to perform again on a limited basis in March 1972. In 1974, she teamed up
with Tony Bennett for a duo act that played in Europe and then came to the U.S.,
starting with a Broadway run at the Minskoff Theatre that played 37 performances
between October 30 and November 24. The two then toured North America through
March 1975. She re-signed to RCA yet again and produced two LPs, Lena and
Michel, accompanied by Michel Legrand, in 1975 and Lena, a New Album in 1976.
She continued to tour in the mid-70s, playing dates with Vic Damone and with
Count Basie & His Orchestra. Meanwhile, her son-in-law, film director Sidney
Lumet, married to her daughter, Gail, was preparing a movie adaptation of The
Wiz, the all-black version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that had opened on
Broadway in 1975, and he cast her as Glinda the Good Witch. She sang Believe in
Yourself in the film and on the soundtrack album, which reached the Top 40 and
went gold upon its release in the fall of 1978. Meanwhile, she had starred in a
revival of the 1940 musical Pal Joey on the West Coast in the spring of 1978,
but the show closed without transferring to Broadway. She continued to make club
appearances in the late 70s, but in March 1980 announced her retirement and went
on a farewell tour that ran from June to August.

But the 63-year-old singer did not retire. Instead, she mounted a one-woman show
that she brought to Broadway. Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music opened at the
Nederlander Theatre on May 12, 1981, and was an instant hit. Within a month, she
was given a special Tony Award marking its success, and the show played 333
performances, the longest run for a one-person production in Broadway history.
The double-LP cast album released by Qwest Records made the pop and R&B LP
charts, and it finally won her a Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance,
Female; it also took the Grammy for Best Cast Show Album. After the show closed
on June 30, 1982, Hornes 65th birthday, she took it on tour around the country
and to London through 1984. At the end of the year, she was a recipient of the
Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement in the arts.

The Men in My LifeHorne performed occasionally during the mid-80s. In the fall
of 1988, Three Cherries Records released her new album, The Men in My Life,
which made number five in the jazz charts. She was given the Grammy Lifetime
Achievement Award in 1989. She was less active in the early 90s, but then
underwent pacemaker surgery, and in June 1993 she performed a special show
devoted to the music of her friend Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellingtons musical
partner) at the JVC Jazz Festival in New York. She recorded an album based on
the show that was released by Blue Note Records in May 1994 under the title Well
Be Together Again. It topped the jazz charts and earned her a Grammy nomination
for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, but she lost to Etta James. She appeared on
Frank Sinatras million-selling Duets II album and was one of the hosts of the
1994 documentary film Thats Entertainment! III, which, like its predecessors,
presented some of her 1940s MGM musical performances, including ones previously
unseen. She performed at Carnegie Hall in September 1994 and the same month
recorded a new live album, An Evening with Lena Horne, issued by Blue Note in
1995. It reached the Top 20 of the jazz charts and won her the Grammy Award for
Best Jazz Vocal Performance. In June 1997, her 80th birthday was celebrated by a
show at the JVC Jazz Festival and the presentation to her of the Ella Award for
Lifetime Achievement in Vocal Artistry. A year later, she released a new Blue
Note album, Being Myself, which made the Top Ten of the jazz charts. She came
out of retirement to record three Billy Strayhorn songs on Classic Ellington, a
Blue Note album by Sir Simon Rattle released in September 2000. One further
album, Seasons of a Life, appeared on Blue Note in 2006, but it encompassed
earlier sessions from the mid- to late 90s. In May 2010, Horne died at the age
of 92. ~ William Ruhlmann

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