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Credit: MICHAEL HENRY ADAMS<\/p>\nNotwithstanding any problems, Harlem still offers all who live here the possibility of a better life, in the world\u2019s best place.<\/p>\n
Improving every day, Harlem\u2019s quality of housing, its comparative spaciousness and relative affordability, its sense of place and historic ambiance, are all unrivaled on Manhattan Island. As a Black man, l\u2019m a preservationist and an historian because of Harlem\u2019s Black heritage. It represents immeasurable accomplishment in the face of adversity and disdain. Imbued in every brick of each old building here is the best of America. By celebrating Blackness, by including us, Harlem embodies me; all that I am. <\/p>\n
\nOver the years, what drew me here had also lured other Ohio natives. Langston Hughes was one (although not born there, he grew up in Cleveland). Another was Raoul Abdul (n\u00e9e Raoul Abdul Rahim), the classical singer, author, and AmNews music critic, who would become Hughes\u2019s last personal assistant and secretary. <\/p>\n
When I first arrived in Uptown, one initial surprise was reading a review in Raoul\u2019s column, \u201cReading the Score.\u201d He\u2019d written about a production of \u201cTosca\u201d at the Metropolitan Opera. Discovering, in an otherwise normal newspaper, something so esoteric, yet easily readable; such nuanced insight and scholarly erudition, astonished me. \u201cWho was this African American connoisseur,\u201d I wondered, \u201c\u2019and how did he come to have such an unusual name?\u201d<\/p>\n
Becoming friends with Raoul by the early 1990s, in time I learned he was born not far from my home in Akron \u2014 in Cleveland, Ohio, on November 7, 1929. Raoul Abdul\u2019s father was from Calcutta. His patrician Black mother was able to trace her ancestry back to the pre-Revolutionary War period. His aunt married Count Basie. <\/p>\n
In 1990, in the AmNews, he explained this for himself: \u201cWhen I was eighteen years old, Leonard Hanna, Jr. (grandson of Mark Hanna, who put McKinley in the White House) treated me to my first trip to New York City. As I boarded the bus, he pressed into my hand a slip of paper with the [message]: \u2018Dear Jimmy, this is Raoul Abdul. Give him anything he wants and save the bill for me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Credit: MICHAEL HENRY ADAMS<\/p>\n
Educated at John Hay High School, precocious Raoul was participating in children\u2019s theater productions by age 6. After secondary school, he began working as a journalist for Northeastern Ohio\u2019s leading Black newspaper, the Cleveland Call & Post. Attractive, highly gifted, and gay, Raoul was noticed and encouraged by the rich art patron Leonard Hanna, whose further backing allowed the 22-year-old to move back to New York permanently in 1951. <\/p>\n
A concert baritone and German lieder expert, Raoul studied voice with renowned Russian baritone Alexander Kipnis from 1959 to 1962. It was under Kipnis\u2019s tutelage that Raoul eventually earned a diploma from Vienna Academy of Music. Raoul also studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music, New School for Social Research, New York College of Music, Mannes College of Music, and Harvard.<\/p>\n
Singing with such notables as William Warfield (who married diva Leontyne Price) and the legendary Marian Anderson, a founding director of Harlem\u2019s Coffeehouse Concerts, Raoul served as literary assistant to Hughes from 1961 until Hughes\u2019s death in 1967. Cast through this position into the sometimes unwelcomed role of confidant, Raoul, for me, put to rest a spate of academic equivocating about his boss and friend\u2019s sexuality, stating, \u201cUnfortunately, I was obliged to sleep with Mr. Hughes twice.\u201d <\/p>\n
On his first evening in town, he told me, \u201cI took a taxi (as instructed) down to Eighth Street in the Village and presented myself with just my valuable scrap of paper as a letter of introduction, to Mr. Jimmie Daniels, the handsome and debonair gentleman who held court nightly at the very fashionable playground of the rich called Bon Soir. Phyllis Diller and a just-starting-out Barbra Streisand also performed there.\u201d<\/p>\n
One problem Raul never had that plagued lots of other creative queer men was an unsupportive family, pressuring him to do something more marketable. I did experience that. \u201cYou can\u2019t be an artist or an interior designer,\u201d my father told me. \u201cWhite people won\u2019t hire you!\u201d Hughes, Jules Bledsoe, and James Lesley \u201cJimmie\u201d Daniels heard much the same thing. <\/p>\n
Born in Laredo, Texas, Daniels grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. Talented as a performer, he was smart enough to move to New York to attend classes at Bird\u2019s Business Institute in the Bronx. Upon completing, he even returned home and worked as an administrative assistant to the president of the Century Life Insurance Company. By 1928, though, he was back. In those first years in Harlem, he hosted cocktail-musicales where he sang, for a dollar per person, at the Bronze Studio (227 Lenox Avenue, extant). Built as a grand townhouse, it was a catering hall owned by Iolanthe Sidney, the patron of low-cost housing for artists, dubbed by Zora Neal Hurston \u201cNiggeratti Manor\u201d (267 West 136th Street; since demolished). <\/p>\n
Performing at the Hot-Cha nightclub (2280 Seventh Avenue; extant), where Billie Holiday started, Daniels met architect Philip Johnson in 1934, who told me he was \u201cthe first Mrs. Johnson.\u201d Daniels was living at this time with writer Wallace Thurman as his roommate. They were the subtenants of their friends, actress Edna Thomas; her husband Lloyd Thomas; and Edna\u2019s lover, English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham, all occupying the spacious co-op they owned on Harlem\u2019s most posh boulevard (1890 Seventh Avenue).<\/p>\n
In short order, he had his own Harlem nightspot: Jimmie Daniels\u2019s supper club (114 West 116th, operating 1939\u20131942; extant). <\/p>\n
On January 27, 1940, Marvel Cooke wrote of Daniels\u2019s progress in the AmNews, \u201cWhen Jimmie first came to Harlem a dozen or so years ago, he had no idea that someday he would be the toast of sophisticated circles on both sides of the Atlantic and that he would number among his friends European royalty, the kings and queens of stage and screen[,] and the princes of industry. The story of Jimmie Daniels reads like something out of a book.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some castigated Daniels\u2019s singing voice as having been \u201cslight,\u201d comparable to Bobby Short\u2019s or even to Rex Harrison\u2019s! Not Raoul, though. \u201cHis voice? His diction and style, were a revelation. One of the special characteristics of Daniels\u2019s vocal performances was always his exemplary English with such precise particularity!\u201d<\/p>\n
With his own thorough training, advantageous connections, and prodigious talents, what became of the similarly glittering career that everyone expected for Raoul Abdul? <\/p>\n
\u201cI had two rather bad addictions,\u201d Raoul explained once over lunch. \u201cYes! I was an excellent musician, and I cared greatly about music, but I cared more about drinking and sex.\u201d<\/p>\n
Publishing his first book, \u201c3000 Years of Black Poetry,<\/a>\u201d in 1970 with author Alan Lomax, he added \u201cThe Magic of Black Poetry<\/a>,\u201d \u201cFamous Black Entertainers of Today,<\/a>\u201d and \u201cBlacks in Classical Music<\/a>\u201d over the next several years. Appreciating how arduous writing and getting into print can be, Raoul was quite complimentary about my 2001 book, \u201cHarlem Lost and Found, an Architectural and Social History, 1765-1915<\/a>.\u201d As to my forthcoming \u201cHomo Harlem, Lesbian and Gay Life in the African American Cultural Capital, 1915\u20131985,\u201d Raoul was beside himself, with both praise and support. After the Gay Pride Parade in 1995, he wrote in his column in the AmNews, \u201cMichael Henry Adams is a knowledgeable young man who has studied Harlem\u2019s history and architecture. He is writing a book about Harlem\u2019s gay and lesbian past, and I only hope that some of you can take some of the things he\u2019s discovered \u2026\u201d <\/p>\n Relocated in Riverdale from his West 22nd Street apartment, after the death of his long-term white lover, attorney Richard Haber after heart-by-pass surgery, Raoul Abdul died quietly on January 15, 2010, at the age of 80. <\/p>\n Like Harlem music lovers, I lost a true friend. <\/p>\n Like this:<\/p>\n Like Loading…<\/p>\n