Overview
Scrapbook, photographs, and drawings documenting the career of African American singer, bandleader, and composer Blanche Calloway.
Dates
- Creation: circa 1914-1950
Creator
- Calloway, Blanche (Person)
Condition Description
Scrapbook pages are brown and crumbling at the margins, some detached from the spine. Clippings are fragile. Several photographs are missing torn portions.
Conditions Governing Access
Open for research.
This collection is shelved offsite at the Harvard Depository. Retrieval requires advance notice. Readers should check with Houghton Public Services staff to determine what material is offsite and retrieval policies and times.
Extent
.25 linear feet (2 boxes)Scrapbook documents Blanche Calloway's career for the years 1934-1938 and contains programs, handbills, telegrams, letters, photographs, clippings, the transcript of an interview, ephemera, and a signed note from Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. Additional papers include three drawings of Calloway, photographs, and a typescript tribute signed Rhoda Dash. Photographs are of Blanche, her brother Cab Calloway, his wives and children, her brother Elmer Calloway, and others.
Biographical / Historical
Blanche Calloway (1902-1978) was an African-American singer, bandleader, and composer. She was the first woman to lead an all-male jazz orchestra successfully; she was also Cab Calloway's older sister and influenced elements of his act. She formed her own big band act in 1931, Blanche Calloway and Her Joy Boys, who performed often in New York (N.Y.); the name eventually became Blanche Calloway and Her Orchestra.
Arrangement
Arranged in folders by type of material.
Physical Location
Harvard Depository
Custodial History
Ownership prior to this acquisition is unknown.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
2022MT-48. Purchased from Walkabout Books with the Frank E. Chase Bequest, 2021 November 26.
Processing Information
This collection was processed to a basic level with minimal rehousing, organization, and preservation. (Melanie Wisner, 2022)
Creator
- Calloway, Blanche (Person)
- Title
- Calloway, Blanche. Blanche Calloway scrapbook and other papers, circa 1914-1950 (MS Thr 2172): Guide
- Status
- completed
- Author
- Houghton Library, Harvard University
- Date
- 2022 January 28
- Description rules
- dacs
- Language of description
- eng
- EAD ID
- hou03435
Repository Details
Part of the Houghton Library Repository
Houghton Library is Harvard College's principal repository for rare books and manuscripts, archives, and more. Houghton Library's collections represent the scope of human experience from ancient Egypt to twenty-first century Cambridge. With strengths primarily in North American and European history, literature, and culture, collections range in media from printed books and handwritten manuscripts to maps, drawings and paintings, prints, posters, photographs, film and audio recordings, and digital media, as well as costumes, theater props, and a wide range of other objects. Houghton Library has historically focused on collecting the written record of European and Eurocentric North American culture, yet it holds a large and diverse number of primary sources valuable for research on the languages, culture and history of indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Houghton Library’s Reading Room is free and open to all who wish to use the library’s collections.
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