#FLORENCE BY MILLS FULL#

Throughout the 1920s, Mills appeared in a number of landmark musical revues, including Plantation Revue (1922), From Dover Street to Dixie (1923), Dixie Street to Broadway (1924), and Blackbirds (1926).

Mills’s star performance helped make Shuffle Along, which is still considered the catalyst of the Harlem Renaissance by many cultural historians, the first successful all-black Broadway show in more than a decade. Her signature performance in Shuffle Along was her rendition of “I’m craving for That Kinda Love,” a love song that became the first of that genre to be performed in an all-black revue on Broadway. The same year, Mills replaced Gertrude Saunders in the starring role of Ruth Little, which ran for more than 200 performances on Broadway. She married Ulysses “Slow Kid” Thompson (a member of a jazz band known as the Tennessee Ten) and made her debut in the hit musical Shuffle Along, a victorious, all-black cast, musical comedy created by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. The year 1921 marked a triumphant period for Mills. To help her financially struggling family, Mills and her two older sisters created “The Mills Sisters,” a dance and singing troupe that performed in theatres in Harlem, New York.

to former slaves Nellie and John Winfrey, Mills moved with her parents to New York City, New York in 1905.

#FLORENCE BY MILLS FULL#

The 1927 Times of London ( UK) obituary noted of Florence Mills, “There is no doubt that she was a real artist full of individuality and intelligence, and her premature death is a sad loss to the profession.” Florence Mills was an internationally-recognized and multifaceted performer who paved the way for other black female stars during the Harlem Renaissance.īorn Florence Winfrey in 1896, in Washington, D.C.

Florence by mills