Adelaide Louise Hall was an American-born UK-based jazz singer and entertainer. Her career spanned more than 70 years from 1921 until her death. Early in her career, she was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance; she became based in the UK after 1938. Hall entered the Guinness Book of World Records in 2003 as the world's most enduring recording artist, having released material over eight consecutive decades. She performed with major artists such as Art Tatum, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Cab Calloway, Fela Sowande, Rudy Vallee, and Jools Holland, and recorded as a jazz singer with Duke Ellington and with Fats Waller.

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.