Gertrude saunders biography

American singer

Musical artist

Gertrude C. Saunders (August 25, 1903 – April 1991)^[1] was an American singer, actress and comedian, active from the 1910s to the 1940s.

Biography

She was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and studied at Benedict College, Columbia before leaving in her teens to join a vaudeville troupe based in Chicago, organized by Billy King.^[2] She was a featured singer and comedian, and performed a number of hit songs including "Wait 'Til the Cows Come Home" (1918), "Hot Dog" (1919), and "Rose of Washington Square" (1920), as well as starring in King's 1919 stage production of Over the Top, which "dramatized the state of African Americans at the time of the Paris Peace Conference".^[3]

In April 1921, she became the star of the first production, in New York, of Shuffle Along, by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, who wrote the songs "Daddy, Won’t You Please Come Home" and "I’m Craving for That Kind of Love"