OBIT OF DAN BURLEY FROM JET MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 8, 1962 SADLY OMITS DUKE MAGAZINE
Dan Burley is the most famous folk you never heard of. Why? Because he was an African-American man. Sorry, but that's just the way it was. (Is?) If you did a six degrees of separation chart for Dan Burley, it would include everyone of any importance in the music and publishing world, but yet again I'll ask. Do you know who Dan Burley was?
Well, let's see...He appeared in films with Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. He wrote music for Cab Calloway. In fact, one can trace his own piano playing right to the Beatles song Lady Madonna. Are you humming that piano run in your head yet? Thank Dan Burley.
Some people can do more than play. Burley was editor of Ebony Magazine way back in the 1930s. He married the first African-American woman to sing in Madison Square Garden. He invented the word Bebop, reportedly, and also created the Harlem Handbook of Jive. I mean, get HEP!
During World War Two, the USO show he organized was the black version of Bob Hope's entertainment for the troops.
He wrote for Elijah Muhammad.
He helped create Jet Magazine
He was personal friends with Ed Sullivan. NO ONE was friends with Ed Sullivan!
He had a radio show. No, he had TWO radio shows.
More importantly for our purposes here...Dan Burley published a GIRLY MAGAZINE!
He published the first serious African-American Men's magazine with sisters posing! DUKE! 1957. That's right...A skin mag with class and Beautiful Black Babes (Not to mention the writing of Chester Himes.) It was a high-fashion lifestyle magazine for the African-American man, a Playboy magazine for the Hood! As such, it SHOULD end my ten-part series on the African-American pin up and should also goose a real writer into a serious biography.
If you search Dan Burley, you'll find him identified as a sports writer. A Journalist. A Jazz Musician. A Poet. And yet he only lived 54 years. His Wiki Biography (which also omits his smut magazine) is HERE
Unfortunately, Duke Magazine lived for only six issues.
There's a few other interesting stories I'm leaving out...but it seems like a pretty high life.
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