John, who went by J.V., was a minister who assembled a troupe of child performers known as the Pickaninny Troubadours, presenting them at black theaters and vaudeville stages across the South.īy the time she was 5, Valada had become the show’s star. Valada’s mother, Etta, was a music teacher who had attended Howard University and taught her children to play instruments and sing. (She later added an “i” to her name, possibly to clarify its pronunciation.) Her sister Lavada later claimed that their father, John, had been a Russophile, and named his first-born child after the city of Vladivostok. Valada Snow was born in Chattanooga, Tenn., on June 2, 1904, the eldest of four children in a musical family. “The chauffeur, the footman and the monkey were all to dress alike,” the cabaret singer and pianist Bobby Short recalled fondly. She rode in a convertible, often with a chauffeur had a personal servant and even acquired a pet monkey. Still, at the height of her success, Snow lived in sumptuous style. “She spent a lot of time in Europe during a key time when jazz was being documented in recordings - she’s back and forth, and that back-and-forth doesn’t give her an opportunity to amass a catalog in the way that many of her peers did.” “This conversation about chronicling the evolution and the progression of jazz has always been rooted in recordings,” Dr. While many musicians held residencies in New York or Chicago clubs during the 1920s and ’30s, often catapulting to famous recording careers, Snow stayed on the road, possibly because club owners and promoters did not see women as viable bandleaders. Yet Snow’s stardom appeared to have an implacable ceiling. That appellation often appeared below her name on the 78-r.p.m.
Handy, who himself was known as the Father of the Blues. “But she was a greatly respected musician on the vaudeville circuit, and even amongst male jazz musicians themselves.”ĭashing and charismatic, Snow earned the nicknames Little Louis - a reference to Louis Armstrong’s influence on her - and Queen of the Trumpet, given to her by W.C. “The unfortunate thing about her legacy is that she wasn’t recorded as much as many of her peers,” Tammy Kernodle, a musicologist at Miami University in Ohio, said in a phone interview. Though she worked hard to reclaim the spotlight, she died in 1956, at 52, in ill health and relative obscurity. When she was finally shuttled out of the country, she returned to the United States physically diminished. But she refused to decamp for the United States and ended up imprisoned - though it was in a Copenhagen jail, not a German concentration camp as she later claimed. Snow was in Denmark during an extended engagement when Nazi Germany stormed across Europe in the early years of World War II. “In fact and fiction both, it is a life to celebrate.”
“She pursued her life and career confidently, indomitably and even defiantly,” her biographer, Mark Miller, wrote in “High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm: The Life and Music of Valaida Snow” (2007). She encouraged that coverage and bent it to her ends, telling tall tales and making her interviews as much a performance as her stage act. African-American newspapers and the international press celebrated Snow both for her immense skill and for her novelty as a female trumpet master.
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