Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a jazz singer, born in Brooklyn of a red Indian mother and a

Negro father she had music in her blood by the time she was 17 she was playing

on Broadway alongside Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker, but her reputation as a great original talent came with the invention of Scat and her recording of Creole Love Corps with Duke Ellington in 1927.

International success followed with the popular song,

I Can't Give You Anything But Love.

From the Cotton Club in New York to the Mulan Rouge in Paris,

she's delighted audiences wherever she's sung and her popularity has

endured with the years. Although she's lived in England since before the war, her

roots are firmly in America and the Jazz Age. She is Adelaide Hall. I suppose Adelaide

when you were growing up jazz was simply the popular music of the time really.

I mean you would never have guessed that it would become some kind of art form.

No, no. And you see that's the thing and to think that you're in surrounded with all the

greats as a young person you never realize.

Who were they? There's great.

Oh, there was Earl Hines, for instance.

There was Fatswala, Art Tatum,

Joe Turner, Duke Ellington, Joe Turner, Duke Wellington, of course, Cab Calloway.

I can't tell you, the amount of real artists there

at that particular time.

You never realized that, was you were too young.

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