The story, as she told it, goes like this: She was born into extreme poverty on a plantation in South Carolina, by a half-black, half-Cherokee mother who had been raped by a white man, and her and her mother struggled everyday to survive, wandering through South Carolina forest and farm country, looking for a place to stay and something to eat, and were rejected at every turn. But when she was sixteen, all but abandoned, killing time in Spanish Harlem, a woman stopped her on the street to ask for directions.
She was going to audition for the Katherine Dunham dance troupe, she said, so Eartha walked her to the place, stuck around, borrowed a leotard, tried out too.
Dunham told Eartha she would never make it as a real dancer (“her breasts are too big”), but Eartha still landed a spot in the traveling performance group.
The Dunham company went to Paris. There, Fred, famed lesbian owner of the club Carroll’s and Marlene Dietrich’s former lover, protected Eartha, telling waiters and patrons she “must not be touched.”
After Paris came London, then Istanbul, where Eartha was happy to discover that the Nicholas Brothers—Fayard and Harold—were staying at the same hotel. The brothers were widely regarded as one of the greatest African American dance acts of their time.
The Katherine Dunham dance troupe’s tour, for instance, was funded by the U.S. government, part of an American effort to introduce jazz and blues to Turkey.
By all accounts, when young Eartha entertained, it was a performance of self-possessed female sexuality, and as a teenage black woman starting her career in a place so linked to U.S. Cold War imperialism, a place deeply segregated along lines of gender, entertainy Muslim men who, until recently, had been under Ottoman rule, their women under lock and veil, and that is where she polished her act, and honed her singing for 2 months.
Kitt's stay in Turkey, during while Ankara Radio gave “Uska Dara” abundant play, turned it into a hit. When she returned to New York, she recorded the song for RCA Records.
It was her first record. It sold 120,000 copies and, in a matter of days, Uska Dara topped American charts. It became the first album to turn such a profit for RCA in twenty-seven years.
Without realizing it, in the recording of “Uska Dara,” Eartha had birthed a genre.
The track became central to Eartha’s cabaret performances, the type of song people would associate with her for the rest of her six-decade-plus career: suggestive, playful, with elements of foreign language.
https://www.messynessychic.com/2014/03/20/celebrating-vintage-black-glamour/
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/01/eartha-kitt-in-istanbul/
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