20 Facts About Cotton Club

Cotton Club was a New York City nightclub from 1923 to 1940.

At its prime, the Cotton Club served as a hip meeting spot, with regular "Celebrity Nights" on Sundays featuring guests such as Jimmy Durante, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Paul Robeson, Al Jolson, Mae West, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Langston Hughes, Judy Garland, Moss Hart, and Jimmy Walker, among others.

Cotton Club was a whites-only establishment with rare exceptions for black celebrities such as Ethel Waters and Bill Robinson.

Cotton Club imposed a subtler color line on the chorus girls, whom the club presented in skimpy outfits.

Ellington was expected to write "jungle music" for a white audience; Ellington's contributions to the Cotton Club were priceless, as described in this 1937 New York Times excerpt: "So long may the empirical Duke and his music making roosters reign—and long may the Cotton Club continue to remember that it came down from Harlem".

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Shows at the Cotton Club were musical revues, and several were called "Cotton Club Parade" followed by the year.

Cotton Club enabled him to develop his repertoire while composing dance tunes for the shows as well overtures, transitions, accompaniments, and "jungle" effects, giving him a freedom to experiment with orchestral arrangements that touring bands rarely experienced.

Cotton Club closed temporarily in 1936 after the race riot in Harlem the previous year.

The site chosen for the new Cotton Club was a big room on the top floor of a building where Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet, an important midtown crossroads at the center of the Great White Way, the Broadway Theater District.

Cotton Club closed permanently in 1940 under pressure from higher rents, changing taste, and a federal investigation into tax evasion by Manhattan nightclub owners.

The Broadway Cotton Club successfully blended the old and new; the site was new and the decor was slightly different, but once a customer was seated it felt like a familiar place.

Madden's goal for the Cotton Club was to provide "an authentic black entertainment to a wealthy, whites-only audience.

James Haskins wrote at the time, "Today, there is a new incarnation of the Cotton Club that sits on the most western end of the 125th Street under the massive Manhattanville viaduct.

Chicago branch of the Cotton Club was run by Ralph Capone, and a California branch was located in Culver City during the late 1920s and early 1930s, featuring performers from the original Cotton Club such as Armstrong, Calloway, and Ellington.

Cotton Club is featured in the music video for the song "Oye Como Va" by Cuban-American singer Celia Cruz.

Francis Ford Coppola's 1984 film The Cotton Club offers a history of the club in the context of race relations in the 1930s and the conflicts between Madden, Dutch Schultz, Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, Lucky Luciano, and Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson.

Cotton Club Comes to the Ritz starring Adelaide Hall, Cab Calloway, Doc Cheatham, The Nicholas Brothers etc.

Cotton Club was briefly depicted in the 1997 movie Hoodlum featuring Laurence Fishburne, Tim Roth, and Andy Garcia as the site of a confrontation between Schultz and Johnson (Fishburne).

Cotton Club is mentioned in the novelization of the 1998 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Far Beyond the Stars".

The novelization mentions that Benny Russell's parents met at the Cotton Club when Russell's mother was a dancer there and gives some descriptive detail of the club.