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unusual facts about Black Bottom


Black Bottom, Detroit

An adjacent north-bordering area known as Paradise Valley contained night clubs where famous Blues, Big Band, and Jazz artists such as Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie regularly performed.


Heidelberg Project

It was created in 1986 by artist Tyree Guyton and his grandfather Sam Mackey ("Grandpa Sam") as an outdoor art environment in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood on the city's east side, just north of the city's historically African-American Black Bottom area.


see also

African-American neighborhood

Playwright August Wilson used the term "ghetto" in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) and Fences (1987), both of which draw upon the author’s experience growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, first a neighborhood of early European immigrants, then a black ghetto.

Nelson Symonds

Throughout this period, Nelson played mainly with bassist Charlie Biddle and drummer Norman Marshall Villeneuve at venues such as The Black Bottom and Rockheads Paradise.