Valaida Snow(1904-1956)
- Actress
Valaida Snow was the product of a musical family; her mother, a music
teacher, taught Valaida and her sisters to play a wide variety of
instruments, among them cello, bass, mandolin, violin, clarinet,
saxophone and accordion. The girls also sang and danced, but when
Valaida turned professional at the age of 15, she began focusing on
vocals and trumpet When she was 22, Snow was headlining Barron Wilkins'
Harlem cabaret show, and throughout the remaining years of the 1920s,
she toured relentlessly, appearing throughout the U.S. in conjunction
with the Will Mastin Trio and performing in London and Paris , pretty
soon she won the admiration of Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines and its
success helped her. By all rights Snow should have been a major
superstar, but as a black performer she was subject to considerable
racism; worse still, as a woman, she was an outsider even within the
jazz community - her perfect pitch, gifts for arranging and brilliant
trumpeting did not help her cause, but only made her that much more of
a curiosity. Snow traveled to Europe with her husband Ananais Berry for
more shows and eventually she made cameos appearance as herself in Take
it from me (1937) and Piéges (1939); however, in 1941, while in
Nazi-occupied Copenhagen, she was captured by German forces and
interned in a concentration camp in Wester-Faengle. Eighteen months
later, she was freed as an exchange prisoner, and allowed to return to
New York; tragically, Snow never fully recovered from the ordeal -
scarred psychologically as well as physically, she attempted to return
to performing, but the spark was clearly gone, so much so that when
Hines saw her appear live in 1943 he reportedly did not even recognize
her. Following her marriage to manager Earle Edwards, she continued to
work in spite of her personal suffering, but after playing the Palace
Theater in New York on May 30, 1956, she died of a massive cerebral
hemorrhage.