Sammy Davis Jr.

Samuel George Davis Jr. was born on the eighth of December 1925 at Harlem, New York, the only child of Sammy Davis Sr. — a tap dancer and the lead male dancer with the Will Mastin Trio — and Elvera Sanchez, a Puerto Rican dancer with the same vaudeville group. His parents separated when he was three; he was raised on the road by his father and his godfather Will Mastin as part of the Will Mastin Trio. The Trio toured the segregated vaudeville circuit through his childhood; he received no schooling beyond what his father and Mastin gave him on trains and at theatres.

He was drafted into the United States Army in 1942 and assigned to an integrated entertainment company in the post-war reorganisation of military entertainment. The army experience — and the racial-abuse he endured at Fort Warren in Wyoming — produced in his later account the public-performance armour that would carry his stage career.

He returned to the Will Mastin Trio after the war and across the next decade developed the multidisciplinary stage technique — singing, dancing, comedy, impression-mimicry, instrumental performance on multiple instruments — that would make him by the mid-1950s the most versatile variety entertainer in the United States. The Trio's run at Ciro's on the Sunset Strip in March 1951 — opening for Janis Paige — produced the booking that established his solo Las Vegas career. He played the El Rancho Vegas in May 1951 and the Last Frontier in June.

He lost his left eye in an automobile accident on Route 66 near San Bernardino on the nineteenth of November 1954. The recovery from the accident — and his religious conversion to Judaism during it — marked the second phase of his career. He starred in the Broadway musical Mr. Wonderful from March 1956 to February 1957 — the first Black male performer to star in a Broadway musical written specifically for him.

His association with the Frank Sinatra Rat Pack at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas from 1959 made him the principal Black entertainer of the Strip from 1959 to 1968 — Sinatra had successfully required the Sands to admit Black patrons and to hire Black hotel staff as a condition of the Rat Pack engagement. He played Sportin' Life in the 1959 Goldwyn film of Porgy and Bess, Yes I Can in 1965 — his autobiography — and the title role in Stop the World — I Want to Get Off on Broadway in 1978.

He died of throat cancer at Beverly Hills on the sixteenth of May 1990, at sixty-four.

He is honored here as the most versatile Black variety entertainer of his generation.