Today In Black History: Dame Cleo Laine
The only female singer to win Grammy nominations in the jazz, classical, and popular categories.
Issue #899 Today In Black History, Monday, July 28, 2025
Born Clementina Dinah Campbell on October 28, 1927, in Southall, Middlesex, England, the daughter of a Black Jamaican father and a white English mother. She showed early singing talent, and her mother encouraged her to take singing and dancing lessons.
She modeled herself after the Black American singers and actors she saw in Black movies such as “Cabin in the Sky.” She especially studied Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughn to learn how to scat and improvise. As a biracial child in the 1940s, she worried that the Nazis would come for her. She started experiencing racism in Britain in the 1950s.
Cleo's career took off in the early 1950s when she joined the band of English bandleader John Dankworth. Their professional collaboration blossomed into a personal partnership, and they married in 1958, remaining together until Dankworth's passing in 2010. The couple helped to put British jazz on the map and encouraged music education.
With an amazing four-octave range contralto voice, Laine achieved international fame that also included acting and writing. She loved to read, especially poetry, and wrote and recorded a song of a piece by ee cummings.
Cleo was the only female singer to have received Grammy nominations across jazz, classical, and popular music categories, and the first British artist to win a Grammy as Best Female Jazz Vocalist.
Cleo Laine's groundbreaking career was marked by her unparalleled ability to traverse musical genres with ease, while her classical repertoire demonstrated her skill in seamlessly integrating operatic techniques into her performances.
Cleo Laine was awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1997.
Dame Cleo Laine died at her home in Wavendon on July 24, 2025, at age 97.
Today In Black History
In 1847, Denmark started to phase out slavery, starting with newborn children of enslaved women and then their parents in 1848.
In 1868, the 14th Amendment, granting citizenship to all persons born in the United States, including former slaves, was passed.
In 1903, Maggie Lena Walker, a business and civic leader, became the first Black woman to head a bank when she opened the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia.
In 1915, U.S. Marines landed in Haiti, and the country became a de facto protectorate of the United States; the occupation lasted until 1934.
In 1917, ten thousand Blacks, led by W.E.B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson, marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City in a silent parade protesting lynchings and racial incidents.
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Oh, Cleo Laine! My heart swoons!
I was introduced to her music at the age of 21 (1976) and was immediately taken!
Thank for the recognizing the other great accomplished greats.