Cotton Club

The Cotton Club was a New York City night club located first in the Harlem neighborhood on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue from 1923 to 1935 and then for a brief period from 1936 to 1940 in the midtown Theater District. The club operated most notably during America's Prohibition Era. The club was a whites-only establishment even though it featured many of the most popular black entertainers of the era, including musicians Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Willie Bryant, vocalists Adelaide Hall, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Aida Ward, Avon Long, the Dandridge Sisters, the Will Vodery Choir, The Mills Brothers, Nina Mae McKinney, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and dancers Bill Robinson, The Nicholas Brothers, Charles 'Honi' Coles, Leonard Reed, Stepin Fetchit, the Berry Brothers, The Four Step Brothers, Jeni Le Gon and Earl Snakehips Tucker.