Sandy West (July 10, 1959 – October 21, 2006) was an American singer, drummer and songwriter. She was one of the founding members of The Runaways, the first teenage all-girl hard rock band to record and achieve widespread commercial success in the 1970s.
Irène Bordoni (16 January 1885 – 19 March 1953) was a Franco-American actress and singer.
Maxine Sullivan (May 13, 1911 – April 7, 1987), born Marietta Williams in Homestead, Pennsylvania, United States, was an American jazz vocalist and performer.
As a vocalist, Sullivan was active for half a century, from the mid-1930s to just before her death in 1987. She is best known for her 1937 recording of a swing version of the Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond". Throughout her career, Sullivan also appeared as a performer on film as well as on stage. A precursor to better-known later vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, Sullivan is considered one of the best jazz vocalists of the 1930s. Singer Peggy Lee named Sullivan as a key influence in several interviews.
Dorothy Dare (born Dorothy Herskind, August 6, 1911 – October 4, 1981) was an American actress and singer.
Tané M. McClure (born June 8, 1958), sometimes credited as Tahnee Cain and Tané Cain, is an American actress, singer, producer, writer, director and film editor.
Gladys Alberta Bentley (August 12, 1907 – January 18, 1960) was an American blues singer, pianist, and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance.
Her career skyrocketed when she appeared at Harry Hansberry's Clam House, a well-known gay speakeasy in New York in the 1920s, as a black, lesbian, cross-dressing performer. She headlined in the early 1930s at Harlem's Ubangi Club, where she was backed up by a chorus line of drag queens. She dressed in men's clothes (including a signature tail coat and top hat), played piano, and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting with women in the audience.
On the decline of the Harlem speakeasies with the repeal of Prohibition, she relocated to southern California, where she was billed as "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player" and the "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs". She was frequently harassed for wearing men's clothing. She tried to continue her musical career but did not achieve as much success as she had had in the past. Bentley was openly lesbian early in her career, but during the McCarthy Era she started wearing dresses and married, claiming to have been "cured" by taking female hormones.
Leah Ray Hubbard (February 16, 1915 – May 27, 1999) was an American singer and actress born in Norfolk, Virginia. She sang with major dance bands and acted in more than a dozen motion pictures.
Andrew Rowan Summers (December 15, 1912– March 1968) was an American folk singer and player of the Appalachian dulcimer. He is credited with a large role in preserving Appalachian music from extinction. Summers was among the earliest musicians to draw attention to the dulcimer to a wider audience outside the Appalachians, with John Jacob Niles being one of the few earlier.Summers was born in Abingdon, Virginia in 1912, and enrolled in the University of Virginia in 1930. Despite his interest in music, he ended up getting a degree in law, working as an attorney and later teaching at New York University.
John Gustave Davis (April 11, 1910 – October 28, 1983) was an American actor, singer and trumpeter.
Edward Lamonte Franklin (January 16, 1928 – July 31, 1975), better known as Guitar Pete Franklin, was an American blues singer, musician and songwriter. His best known track was "Guitar Pete's Blues".Franklin variously worked with a number of fellow blues musicians including St. Louis Jimmy Oden, Jazz Gillum, John Brim, Sunnyland Slim, and Tampa Red.