Cotton Club

40.8185055556-73.937361111110000Coordinates: 40° 49′ 6.6″ N, 73° 56′ 14.5″ W

The Cotton Club was a nightclub in New York City that featured many famous African American jazz musicians and entertainers such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway during the Prohibition era of the 1920s and 1930s.

The club was opened in 1920 by boxing champion Jack Johnson as Club Delux on the corner of 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. In 1923 it was taken over by the bootlegger and gangster Owney Madden and renamed the Cotton Club. The club quickly became a well-known hangout during the Prohibition era, including for New York's high society. The interior design reproduced a racist stereotype of the lives of "savage, primitive Negro slaves" in the rural American South. Although the musicians and dancers engaged in the club were virtually all African-Americans, non-white guests were denied entry to the club.

The performing musicians also had to fit into the desired image. Duke Ellington, for example, was expected to play "jungle music," from which the bandleader developed the later famous Jungle Style, the trademark of his orchestra in the late 1920s. At Ellington's insistence, admission rules for non-whites were relaxed over the years.

The Cotton Club played an important role in the fame and development of many jazz bands of the time. In 1923, Fletcher Henderson's band performed there. After the Missourians, Duke Ellington's orchestra was the Cotton Club's house band from 1927 to 1931 and became known throughout the United States through radio broadcasts from the club. From 1931 Cab Calloway's band became the house band, followed from 1934 by Jimmie Lunceford's orchestra. Stars such as Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson also performed at the Cotton Club. Singer Lena Horne, initially a member of the dance troupe, began her solo career at the club.

The Cotton Club was briefly closed several times, first in 1925 for violating the Prohibition laws and in 1936 as a result of the Harlem riots of 1935. The club was reopened in 1937 at another location in Manhattan (at the corner of Broadway and 48th Street), but was forced to close its doors permanently in 1940 for economic reasons. In 1978, a new club of the same name opened on 125th Street in Harlem.

In art

• Cotton Club: a 1984 feature film directed by Francis Ford Coppola that evokes the myth of the club and focuses on the struggles of gangsters Owney Madden, Dutch Schultz, Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll and Lucky Luciano.
• The club was mentioned in Ken Burns' 2001 documentary Jazz.
• In the feature film Taxi! starring James Cagney, part of the action takes place in the fictional Cotton Pickers Club, which is a reference to the Cotton Club.