Sadie Crawford (27 December 1885 – 18 December 1965), also known as Sadie Johnson and Sadie Mozee, was a British-American performer of the early jazz era, one of the few white female performers of her day to have enjoyed an international career. Early life Based for the last 35 years of her life in Washington, D.C., United States, she was born Louisa Harriet Marshall in Tooting, London on 27 December 1885. The youngest of the seven children of Francis Thomas Marshall and his wife Ellen Maria, she maintained a close bond with her siblings and their families throughout her life. The household in which she grew up was a somewhat unconventional one: her father, a removal-man, died just before her fifth birthday, and shortly afterwards her mother Ellen began a relationship with a man some 20 years her junior, Louis Slade, with whom in 1892 she went on to have one further child. Ellen and Louis finally married in 1905, four years before Ellen’s death. Most of Louisa’s siblings lived their adult lives in south London. Throughout her life she remained particularly close to her eldest sister Mrs. Rhoda Matilda Newbon, who was mother to 13 children. Stage career and personal life Sadie took to the stage in London in her mid teens, and it is clear that early on she developed a taste for black popular culture, and music in particular. She would marry twice; both her husbands were black Americans. Numerous photographs show she presented herself as a 'black', 'coloured' or 'creole' woman and several newspaper articles also suggest that her origins were more exotic than they really were. Throughout her career she seems to have used professionally the forename Sadie, although the origins of this stage name are not known. Various sources allow us to piece together Sadie’s career. Not least among these is a short account of her life that she herself wrote in 1960 in her mid 70s. From this we learn that she left school at 11 (working initially as a domestic servant) and within a few years was employed as a dancer at London’s Empire Theatre. Her first big break came with an invitation from the American entertainer Laura Hampton (née Bowman) to join her review troupe, following which she was signed up for a European tour of the show 'A Trip to Coontown'. Sadie met her first husband, saxophonist Adolph Crawford, in