Cotton Club Program, c. 1938. [Signed by Cab Calloway]

New York City, 1938. Small folio, 12 x 9 inches, (16) unnumbered pages. Signed boldly by Calloway on the front cover above the leg of the dancer in the illustration. Near Fine.. An illustrated program for the Cotton Club from 1937/1938, with photographs of Cab Calloway, the Nicholas Brothers, and Mae Johnson, in addition to information about the Club’s fifth edition of their Cotton Club Parade (though this is a larger program). This copy documents the Midtown Manhattan iteration of the Cotton Club, which moved from Harlem to Broadway and 48th Street in 1936 after the Harlem location closed following the Harlem riot of 1935. The new venue attempted to reproduce the earlier club’s formula of elaborate revues combining jazz orchestras, chorus lines, and specialty dancers in large-scale stage productions such as the Cotton Club Parade. While the performers remained overwhelmingly African American—including Calloway’s orchestra and many of the dancers—the audience at the club continued to be largely white, reflecting the segregated entertainment culture of the period. This arrangement had long been criticized by Harlem writers and intellectuals; Langston Hughes, writing during the Harlem Renaissance, famously described the Cotton Club as a “Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites,”[1] objecting to the racial restrictions placed on patrons even as Black musicians and dancers provided the entertainment. The Midtown Cotton Club continued presenting revues and broadcasts through the late 1930s but ultimately closed in 1940, bringing an end to one of the most famous nightclubs associated with the Harlem Renaissance and the swing era.

Not in OCLC, though see 951748496 for a shorter four page program for the fifth edition of the Cotton Club Parade, published in 1938 and held at East Carolina University.

[1] Langston Hughes, “When the Negro was in Vogue,” in The Big Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, 1940).