Mick Hartley: Sensations of 1945

Pianist Dorothy Donegan, together with Gene Rogers coming in on the other piano, and a manic Cab Calloway waving his baton around:

From the film "Sensations of 1945", starring dancer Eleanor Powell (see a spectacular dance sequence from the film here) with Dennis O'Keefe, and including the last appearance of WC Fields before his death in 1946.

But that extraordinary Dorothy Donegan....

She was classically trained, as well as being a protégée of Art Tatum, who once called her "the only woman who can make me practice." [She said about Tatum that "He was supposed to be blind...I know he could see women."]

In 1943, Donegan became the first black artist to perform at Chicago's Orchestra Hall. She later said of her pathbreaking performance:

In the first half I played Rachmaninoff and Grieg and in the second I drug it through the swamp – played jazz. Claudia Cassidy reviewed the concert on the first page of the Chicago Tribune. She said I had a terrific technique and I looked like a Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph.

If you're wondering why you've never heard of her, it may be because "her flamboyant personality, tendency to mix unrelated genres in the same concert, and willingness to do lounge music may have caused her to be undervalued in jazz circles". Critic Ben Ratliff argued in the New York Times that "her flamboyance helped her find work in a field that was largely hostile to women. To a certain extent, it was also her downfall; her concerts were often criticized for having an excess of personality."

She herself was quite clear that it was plain old sexism, along with her insistence on being paid the same rates as male musicians, that limited her career.

She died aged 76 in 1998.