By james art 
This week in the Texas Music History is maintained by Brane Audio.
On January 31, 1934, the singer Eta Moten Barnet played in the White House, the first black woman to do so in the 20th century.
Eta Moten was born in Weimar, Texas, in 1901 and began singing there as a young girl in her church choir. After graduating from high school, she marries, moves to Oklahoma and starts a family. She divorced her first husband and moved to study voice and drama at Western University and the University of Kansas.
After his senior recital Motten moved to New York to work at the Music Theater, and then to Los Angeles in 1933 to pursue a career in cinema – and she finds it by making her debut at Gold Diggers of 1933 “Berley Berkeley’s, and that same year, she played her most famous movie role as a Brazilian singer along with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astar in Flying Down to Rio.
Her remarkable performance of the song “La Carioca” welds her with a costume with fruits accumulated high on her head, years before Carmen Miranda promotes the vision to the American audience. In January 1934, this movie success caused Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt to invite Motten Barnet for a White House concert.
After Hollywood, Barnet returns to New York to work on Broadway. Among her remarkable roles, there was a turn like Bess in Porgie and Bes by George Gershwin from 1942 to 1945.S Some stories even suggest that Gershwin wrote the role of Bess with the thought of Barnet-he composed it in 1934, just when her most famous film performances were in circulation.
In the same year, Motten married journalist Claude Barnet and together Claude and Eta began to deal with civil and civil rights. In the 1950s and 1960s, the couple traveled as US representatives to the new independent countries Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia. This reflects their work on civil rights at home.
A friend and fellow artist-activist Harry Belafonte once said about the Motten Barnet Eta Motten Barnet that “she enabled black people to look at themselves on the big screen as something beautiful when everything was there before was talking about our degradation. .
Sources:
Candice Gudwin in Lori E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan and Anne T. Smith, ed. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second edition. Denton, Texas: Texas State History Association, 2012