- Josephine Baker (1906-1979), more than any other female performer of the Harlem Renaissance, came to represent the new Black talent and music that swept Europe following World War I. This “Jazz Cleopatra” wrote five autobiographies, a novel, and a collection of fairy tales that expressed her vision of universal harmony, and she also starred in several “exotic” European films during the 1920s and 1930s. In her 1927 autobiography, Baker limns her own myth: the daughter of a washerwoman, she came out of the slums of St. Louis to make her first nightclub appearance at the age of eight, left St. Louis at fifteen to join Bessie Smith’s traveling show, then went on to New York and the period’s signature musicals, Shuffle Along and Chocolate Dandies. Considered too dark and big-hipped for anything but comedic roles, she soon left color-struck Harlem for Paris and La Revue Negre, the show that transformed her at nineteen from Josephine to La Baker. With the Folies Bergere she internationalized the Black flapper as the personification of le jazz hot and introduced the Black Bottom and Charleston to European audiences, eclipsing the reputation of every other “show girl” from the twenties—when her legend took root—to well into the sixties.
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