Emmanuel Taylor Gordon (April 29, 1893 – May 5, 1971) was a

singer Singing is the act of creating musical sounds with the voice. A person who sings is called a singer, artist or vocalist (in jazz and/or popular music). Singers perform music (arias, recitatives, songs, etc.) that can be sung with or without ...

and vaudeville performer associated with the Harlem Renaissance in the mid-1920s. He was born in

White Sulphur Springs, Montana White Sulphur Springs is a city in and the county seat of Meagher County, Montana, United States. The population was 955 at the 2020 census. The center of population of Montana is located in White Sulphur Springs. White Sulphur Springs was o ...

and moved to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

at the age of 17. His career faded after the 1920s, and in 1959 he retired to White Sulphur Springs, where he died in 1971. In addition to his singing career, Gordon is remembered today for his 1929

autobiography An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written account of one's own life. It is a form of biography. Definition The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English peri ...

, ''Born to Be,'' which recounts his youth as an

Afro-American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of enslav ...

in small-town Montana, and his experiences in 1920s Harlem.

References

External links

Black Past

Montana Historical Society
1893 births 1971 deaths Writers from Montana Singers from Montana Singers from New York (state) Vaudeville performers People from White Sulphur Springs, Montana 20th-century American singers 20th-century American male singers {{US-singer-stub