Etta Moten Barnett

Etta Moten was born on the fifth of November 1901 at Weimar, Texas, the only child of Freeman F. Moten — an African Methodist Episcopal minister of the Texas state conference — and Ida Norman Moten, a schoolteacher. The family relocated through her father’s pastoral postings at successive AME charges across the Texas hill country and the Kansas plains across the first fifteen years of her life.

She was placed at fifteen at the Western University of Quindaro, Kansas — an AME-affiliated normal school — and at twenty at the Paine College at Augusta, Georgia. She left Paine in 1919 to marry the army officer Curtis Brooks, with whom she had three daughters, and divorced him in 1925.

She took the bachelor’s in fine arts at the University of Kansas at Lawrence in 1931 — among the first Black bachelor’s graduates of the institution — and moved to New York the following year for theatrical work.

She was cast in 1933 in the Eddie Cantor RKO Radio Pictures musical Flying Down to Rio in the speaking and singing role of the South American singer of the Carioca number — and dubbed in the same year the singing voice of the principal Black actress Theresa Harris in the RKO film Professional Sweetheart.

She gave the first performance of the Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg song Stormy Weather at the Cotton Club at Harlem in April 1933 — the song subsequently associated with her contemporary Lena Horne.

She was invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to perform at the East Room of the White House for President Franklin Roosevelt’s birthday concert on the thirty-first of January 1934 — the first Black entertainer received at the White House as a stage artist rather than as a domestic.

She was cast in 1942 in the Cheryl Crawford Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess in the principal role of Bess, opposite Todd Duncan (placed in this archive) as Porgy. The revival ran 286 performances at the Majestic Theatre — the longest run of any Porgy and Bess production at the time and the production that secured the work’s place in the standard Broadway repertoire.

She died at Chicago on the second of January 2004 of complications of pancreatic cancer, at one hundred and two.

She is honored here as the Bess of the 1942 Porgy and Bess revival.