here she is at 92 years old - singing and playing drums....2017
And switches to JAMES BROWN!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/arts/dance/othella-dallas-dead.html
I had no idea who this lady was so I looked her and discovered her age!!
She died last year at 95 years old.
Othella Dallas, who was one of the last surviving early members of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the nation’s first self-supporting Black modern dance troupe, and taught the Afro-Caribbean-influenced Dunham technique in Europe well into her 90s, died on Nov. 28 at a nursing home in Binningen, Switzerland. She was 95.
Her son, Peter Wydler, said the cause was lung cancer.
The sound of conga drums reverberated at Ms. Dallas’s studio in Basel, Switzerland, for years as she gyrated to their rhythm. Her students watched reverently, eager to learn from a woman who had learned from Dunham, the matriarch of Black dance, who died in 2006.
Singing "Oh Happy Day" at 94 years old...knowing she has lung cancer!!
She seized her own spotlight in the 1950s as a blues and R&B singer, sharing stages with Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole. She appeared at the Apollo Theater in Harlem with Sammy Davis Jr. And she had the distinction of singing in a stage musical orchestrated by a young Quincy Jones, “Free and Easy,” which flopped so badly that it left him and his band broke and stranded in Europe.
Ms. Dallas settled in Switzerland in the 1960s, but she also kept performing, gradually becoming an esteemed elder stateswoman of the blues. In 2005, she played at the founding concert of the Festival da Jazz in St. Moritz, and she went on to perform there annually. Last year she received a Swiss Jazz Award.
Wow - no wonder I had never heard of her!!
her grandmother took her to a voodoo priest, who prescribed that her legs get massaged in greasy dishwater while he recited an incantation.
After enough dips in the kitchen sink, he said she was cured.
“Let her dance,” he proclaimed.
“Let her dance where?” her mother asked. “Those old dirty nightclubs?”
“I don’t care where she dances,” he said. “But let her dance.”
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