The Curious Case of ‘Naughty Little Nora,’ a Jazz Age Shape Shifter

Nora Holt was a pioneer of Chicago’s Black classical music scene. A friend of Josephine Baker, she later became a blues singer in Parisian nightclubs.

A 1934 portrait of Nora Holt by Carl Van Vechten.

By Samantha Ege, New York Times

Nov. 12, 2024

“Fabulous is the word for Mrs. Nora Douglas Holt,” read the 1974 obituary in The Amsterdam News.

And fabulous she was: A pioneer of the Black classical music scene in Chicago, Holt also became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age in Paris. Born into the middle-class, she moved back and forth between worlds: concert artist and blues singer, newspaper columnist and club hostess, erudite scholar and scandalous socialite.

This fluidity led to friendships with two women who represented distinct versions of fame for Black women in the early 20th century: Josephine Baker, the working-class dancer from St. Louis, who became the toast of Paris; and the composer Florence Price, who transformed Chicago’s classical music scene, rising to national fame with her symphonies.

Holt’s life didn’t follow familiar narratives. Hers was not a rags-to-riches story, like Baker’s; nor was it, like Price’s, a cathartic breakthrough for Black musicians in the white world of classical music. Instead, she had a kind of mutability, frequently changing her name and her place in culture, collapsing ideas about respectability and sexual liberation.

Music was the through line in Holt’s life. She first made her name in classical music. For young, middle-class Black women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, classical music could open doors to salon culture, church leadership, jobs teaching music and civic engagement.

In 1918, Holt, a pianist, became the first Black person in the United States, female or male, to earn a master’s degree in music, from Chicago Musical College. She also worked in the male-dominated fields of music criticism, scholarship and composition. Her music journalism, public lectures, recitals and community organizing became a blueprint for other Black women seeking to become leaders in Chicago’s classical musical scene.

“Of course, men are supposed to have better business minds than women,” she wrote to a male colleague after founding a magazine, Music and Poetry, in 1921. “But I have made this thing go and the opportunities are yet unlimited.”

Holt’s musical work was documented in Black newspapers. But the historical record of her beginnings is fuzzier. She was born either Lena Douglas or Nora Douglas, in Missouri, although she would say that she was born in Kansas City, Kan. Her obituaries give her birth year as 1885, but other sources say 1890.

Holt’s father was a presiding elder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And her mother was a matron at Western University in Quindaro, Kan., where Holt would graduate as class valedictorian. Holt’s mother was also her first music teacher, instructing her in classical piano. (Price was also taught by her mother, a common music-making dynamic in Black middle-class households.)

Holt thrived in the bourgeois enclave of Quindaro, where her family was well known and respected. According to social expectations of the era, she should have “settled down” and become a teacher, as Price did when she returned to the South after studying at the New England Conservatory.

And maybe Holt tried — she had been married three times before she was 30. But, in the end, she left Kansas in 1915 and moved to Chicago. There, she stepped confidently into a new role, using the name Lena Douglas and becoming a musical “race woman.”

Race women were Black intellectuals and artists committed to the entwined goals of gender equality and racial uplift. Race women were seen as stateswomen for the Black community, and their reputations had to be spotless. Their private pleasures and sexual liberation were to be neither seen nor heard in public.

In 1917, Holt became the first music critic for The Chicago Defender, a pioneering Black newspaper. She filled her columns with stories of Black classical musicians, chronicling the brilliance of women like Hazel Harrison (the first Black instrumentalist to play with the Berlin Philharmonic) and the Philadelphia contralto Marian Anderson, whose singing so captivated Holt that she established a scholarship for Anderson’s studies.

Holt enrolled in the master’s program at the Chicago Musical College, where she earned a degree in piano performance, music theory and composition. She astutely used her Chicago Defender connections to make sure her accomplishments were publicized. Her master’s portfolio, submitted in 1918, included a monumental 42-page work for a 100-piece orchestra titled “Rhapsody on Negro Themes.”

In 1918 Lena began calling herself Nora and acquired the surname Holt after marrying her second-to-last husband, George W. Holt, a much-older businessman. He gave her a gorgeous brownstone at 4405 South Prairie Avenue, where she founded the National Association of Negro Musicians, the longest standing association of Black classical musicians in the United States.

The years just after World War I were an exciting time for Nora Douglas Holt. And she felt the electricity of a new era, one that she called a “Chicago renaissance” decades before historians rightfully, if retrospectively, named this period the Black Chicago Renaissance.

But when Holt’s husband died in 1921, she withdrew from her musical activities in Chicago.

Holt’s successor at The Chicago Defender, Maude Roberts George, was one of the many female presidents of the National Association of Negro Musicians during the interwar years.

It was George who paid $250 to underwrite a contract with the Chicago Symphony that led to Price making history as the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major national orchestra. On June 15, 1933 — nearly 15 years after Holt wrote her symphonic “Rhapsody on Negro Themes” — the all white, all male Chicago Symphony premiered Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E minor.

These events are arguably part of Holt’s legacy, but she was not there to witness them.

Holt left Chicago in 1922. What made her abandon the successful life she had built for herself there? This question represents a gap in her narrative, with only speculation to fill it. For whatever reasons, Holt was not content to stay solely within the classical world — nor within the respectable parameters of race womanhood.

In 1923, she married her fifth and final husband in Pittsburgh: Joseph L. Ray, a Black businessman who was a secretary to the steel magnate Charles M. Schwab. Over the next few years, Holt also spent a good deal of time in Harlem’s vibrant cultural scene — a bone of contention for Ray who wanted her in Pittsburg. Defiant, Holt went even farther afield, leaving for Europe in 1926.

The photographer Carl Van Vechten in Harlem wrote to Gertrude Stein in Paris alerting her that Holt, now Nora Ray, was coming. “I am sending you several people, all of whom matter more or less, but the most is Nora Ray, who is slightly mulatto, terribly amusing, adorable, rich, chic, et autres choses aussi. Get her to sing for you if you can.”

Negrophilia — a craving for all things Black — had swept across Europe. That summer of 1926, Baker was making waves in Paris at the Folies Bergère and Holt was there to witness it.

“She made her debut clad in bananas and bathed in myriad lights,” Holt later wrote in a column for The Amsterdam News, “as a flower-laden basket descended from the ceiling to reveal a new star dancing the Charleston.” A friendship formed between the two, and more connections would be made.

In Paris, Holt soon embraced a flamboyant new persona as a vocalist and sexually liberated woman. She teasingly called this new self “naughty little Nora” in interviews with the Black press.

While living in France, she studied composition by day (at the Sorbonne in the 1920s, with the renowned teacher and composer Nadia Boulanger in the 1930s). By night, she sang sultry blues in the clubs with an “astonishing” voice and seductive charm that evoked, as one London critic said, “Napoleon’s Josephine.”

An old, sepia-toned photo shows a woman in a white suit holding a drink. She wears a trimmed hat and has her arm through that of a slightly portly man in a light-colored suit, wearing a carnation in his lapel.

Maybe Holt found this form of self-expression freeing as her highly publicized divorce from Ray, which was finalized in 1930 after a four-year court battle, made her a scandalous figure in the Black press. She went back to being Nora Holt to detach herself from the drama, but taunting comic strips that used all three names — “Nora Holt Ray” — and depicted her in the bed of another man wouldn’t let her forget.

“As a woman,” she said to The Chicago Defender, she could only ask the public “to consider the motives underlying the series of attacks and they will see that I have been unjustly framed.”

By whatever name, this Jazz Age Nora looked a little different. Gone were her darker tresses in favor of a blond look that allowed her to (falsely) brand herself as Creole and play up her exoticism as she sang the blues to European audiences who couldn’t understand the lyrics but worshiped her all the same. “These French are too excitable to be stable,” she said in a letter to Van Vechten, signed “Nora Holt” with the name “Ray” struck through and punctuated with “Ha Ha!”

Holt had blossomed into a darling of the international club scene. At a London appearance in 1929, a smitten Prince Edward of Wales raced to shake her hand after a performance.

“Hello Harlem, your naughty little Nora will be seein’ ya!” Holt teased her followers who soaked up her escapades in the Black press.

And yet, naughty little Nora never lost her identity as a classical musician. She continued to write criticism and later championed Black composers (including Margaret Bonds) as a radio host on WNYC.

Sadly her classical compositions are mostly lost, leaving us to wonder about her symphonic palette and pianistic colors. Along with her “Rhapsody on Negro Themes,” 200 or so works were stolen while she was studying in Paris with Boulanger. All that remain are two works from 1921: a jaunty piano rag called “Negro Dance” and a gentle art song called “The Sand-Man.” If not quite representative of a woman who wrote for 100-piece orchestras, they are at least representative of her musical duality.

How did Holt see her life? Though she was a prolific writer of music reviews and letters, she didn’t leave a record of her more personal thoughts. Contemporary accounts, especially in the Black press, were intrigued with both sides of her persona — the classical musician and the Jazz Age “naughty” Nora — even if they couldn’t reconcile them: Her scholarly accomplishments were celebrated as much as her more salacious adventures were sensationalized. The dissonance and defiance were, no doubt, what made her story so captivating to the wider public.

Much of Holt’s story unfolds in fragments, scattered across newspapers, magazines, letters and the archives of others. But despite the gaps in her narrative, it is clear that Holt helped expand what was possible for Black women of her time. Telling this story means not tying her contradictory strands into a neat bow, but embracing the multiple textures and tensions that shaped her fabulous life.

Samantha Ege is a music historian who teaches at the University of Southampton in England. Her book “South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene” comes out this week from the University of Illinois Press.