{"id":41266,"date":"2017-12-15T03:00:34","date_gmt":"2017-12-15T08:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=41266"},"modified":"2020-08-07T09:42:36","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T13:42:36","slug":"josephine-baker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/12\/15\/josephine-baker\/","title":{"rendered":"Josephine Baker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I think I first heard of Josephine Baker in the Al Stewart song from his <em>Last Days of the Century<\/em> album:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"853\" height=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/osVjsfJ5_Wo\" frameborder=\"0\" gesture=\"media\" allow=\"encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>At <em>Open Culture<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openculture.com\/2017\/12\/josephine-baker.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Josh Jones<\/a> has a brief biography of Josephine Baker that touches on most of the salient points of her career and life:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There has maybe never been a better time to critically examine the granting of special privileges to people for their talent, personality, or wealth. Yet, for all the harm wrought by fame, there have always been celebrities who use the power for good. The twentieth century is full of such figures, men and women of conscience like Muhammad Ali, Nina Simone, and Paul Robeson \u2014 extraordinary people who lived extraordinary lives. Yet no celebrity activist, past or present, has lived a life as extraordinary as Josephine Baker\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p>Born Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906 to parents who worked as entertainers in St. Louis, Baker\u2019s early years were marked by extreme poverty. \u201cBy the time young Freda was a teenager,\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/culture\/story\/20141222-from-exotic-dancer-to-activist\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">writes Joanne Griffith at the BBC<\/a>, \u201cshe was living on the streets and surviving on food scraps from bins.\u201d Like every rags-to-riches story, Baker\u2019s turns on a chance discovery. While performing on the streets at 15, she attracted the attention of a touring St. Louis vaudeville company, and soon found enormous success in New York, in the chorus lines of a string of Broadway hits.<\/p>\n<p>Baker became professionally known, her adopted son <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/01\/22\/style\/jean-claude-baker-son-of-josephine-baker-is-remembered.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Jean-Claude Baker<\/a> writes in his biography, as \u201cthe highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville.\u201d A great achievement in and of itself, but then she was discovered again at age 19 by a Parisian recruiter who offered her a lucrative spot in a French all-black revue. \u201cBaker headed to France and never looked back,\u201d parlaying her nearly-nude <em>danse sauvage<\/em> into international fame and fortune. Topless, or nearly so, and wearing a skirt made from fake bananas, Baker used stereotypes to her advantage \u2014 by giving audiences what they wanted, she achieved what few other black women of the time ever could: personal autonomy and independent wealth, which she consistently used to aid and empower others.<\/p>\n<p>Throughout the 20s, she remained an archetypal symbol of jazz-age art and entertainment for her Folies Berg\u00e8re performances (see her dance the Charleston and make comic faces in 1926 in the looped video above). In 1934, Baker made her second film <em>Zouzou<\/em> (top), and became the first black woman to star in a major motion picture. But her sly performance of a very <a href=\"http:\/\/en.tintin.com\/albums\/show\/id\/26\/page\/0\/0\/tintin-in-the-congo\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">European idea of African-ness<\/a> did not go over well in the U.S., and the country she had left to escape racial animus bared its teeth in hostile receptions and nasty reviews of her star Broadway performance in the 1936 <em>Ziegfeld Follies<\/em> (a critic at Time referred to her as a \u201cNegro wench\u201d). Baker turned away from America and became a French citizen in 1937.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think I first heard of Josephine Baker in the Al Stewart song from his Last Days of the Century album: At Open Culture, Josh Jones has a brief biography of Josephine Baker that touches on most of the salient points of her career and life: There has maybe never been a better time to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1117,28,13],"tags":[177,1391,200,786,99],"class_list":["post-41266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-france","category-media","category-usa","tag-alstewart","tag-biography","tag-music","tag-paris","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aJA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41266"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59402,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41266\/revisions\/59402"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}