American singer-songwriter Alberta Hunter was BOTD in 1895. Born in Memphis, Tennessee to a working-class family, she ran away from home at 11 and headed to Chicago. Joined later by her mother, she began working as a singer in brothels and nightclubs. After developing a name at the white-owned Panama Club, her big break came as a singer with King Oliver and his band at the Dreamland Cafe. In 1917, she toured in Paris and London, and became a popular stage and nightclub performer, appearing in the 1928 London premiere of the musical Show Boat. A prolific songwriter, she recorded extensively throughout the 1920s, and wrote the hit song Downhearted Blues, but was cheated out of royalty payments. The song later became a hit for Bessie Smith, selling a million copies. After her mother’s death in 1957, she quit show-business, retrained as a nurse and spent 20 years working in hospitals in New York. Lured out of retirement in the 1970s, she began a six-year nightclub residency in Greenwich Village and recorded a number of albums. Hunter was briefly married to Willard Townsend in 1919, divorcing four years later. She had a long-term relationship with Lottie Tyler, and was friends with many of the lesbian and bisexual members of the Harlem Renaissance movement. She died in 1984 aged 89.