Lyricist, Singer, dancer, arranger, and trumpeter Valaida Snow was born on June 2, 1905, in Chattanooga, Tennessee to John Snow, a minister who assembled a troupe of child performers known as the Pickaninny Troubadours who toured throughout the South performing on Black theater and vaudeville stages. Her mother was Etta Snow, a Howard University-educated music teacher, who taught her children to play instruments and sing.
The eldest of four, Valaida’s siblings were Lavada Snow, Arvada Snow, Hattie Snow, and her stepbrother, Artemus Bush. The parents taught all the children to play instruments and perform. However, Valaida displayed incredible promise early on. By age 15, she was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, playing the accordion, banjo, cello, clarinet, harp, mandolin, saxophone, trumpet, and violin. As a teenager, she married Samuel Lewis Lanier, a fellow entertainer, and began appearing professionally during the Harlem Renaissance. Snow began receiving national attention when she joined the Holiday in Dixieland Revue in 1921 at the age of 16. The following year, in 1922, she was the music and dance attraction at Barron Deware Wilkins’s Harlem Cabaret. In 1924, she performed in the Broadway musical, Bamville, with the legendary Josephine Baker.
In 1926, Snow toured London, England, and Paris, France, with Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds Revue. From 1926 to 1929, she toured with Jack Carter’s Serenaders in Shanghai, Singapore, Calcutta, and Jakarta, thus becoming one of the first US citizens to perform American Jazz in cities in Asia. In 1931, she wrote and recorded her signature song, “High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm,” and went on to star in Rhapsody in Black. In 1933, she appeared in the famous Madrid Palestra ballroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and the following year even though she was not divorced from Lanier, she married Ananias John Willington “Nyas” Berry Jr. from New Orleans, Louisiana.
Between 1937 and 1939, Snow appeared in a cameo in the French film Prends-le moi (Take It from Me), about a boxer trying to fight for the championship title in the US. The film was directed by William Beaudine and released in London in 1937. She also appeared in Pièges (Pitfalls) a film directed by Robert Siodmakin in 1939.
Snow remained in Europe at the beginning of World War II and was seized in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1941 and thrown in a Nazi prison, Vestre Fængsel, despite having no criminal charges against her. The Danes, however, prevented her from going to a concentration camp by transferring her to a psychiatric ward allegedly to treat her drug addiction.
Upon returning to the United States in 1942, her encounter with the Nazis in occupied Denmark made headlines in the Chicago Defender. Snow was back on stage in 1943 at the Apollo Theater in New York City and in 1945 at the first Cavalcade of Jazz produced by Leon Hefflin at the original Wrigley Field Ballpark in south central Los Angeles, California. There she performed with big band jazz conductor Count Basie.
Considered by many to be the “Queen of the Trumpet” Valaida Snow, who recorded more than 40 songs in European studios, died of a brain hemorrhage on May 30, 1956, shortly after a performance at the Palace Theatre in New York City. She was 52.
