This year, AVG-Carhif is celebrating its 30th anniversary! To mark the occasion, we are presenting our favourites throughout 2025.
Today, Babette, Dutch-speaking archivist at the AVG-Carhif, presents her favourite: a small personal archive of May Dale, known as Belgium’s first jazz singer. This time, it is an archive from Fonds Suzan Daniel.
English translation of the video
Babette: Hello, I’m Babette and I’m a temporary Dutch-speaking archivist at the AVG-Carhif.
AVG-Carhif: What is your favourite item in our collection?
Babette: I have chosen a small personal archive. It belongs to May Dale, whose real name was Emmy Daelman and who is said to have been Belgium’s first jazz singer.
AVG-Carhif: Can you tell us a little more about it?
Babette: In the 1930s, she had become a very famous singer. She sang in orchestras led by well-known male names such as André Pelleman, Stan Brenders and Fud Candrix. She also sang on the radio and in casinos, and even at the AB in Brussels. After that, she did a lot of other things. In the 1950s, she opened a café with a friend in Heide called “De Open Haard”, where she often performed herself and also gave young artists the opportunity to perform on stage.
The archive contains many personal items. Lots of travel diaries and clippings, books, photo albums too, in which you can actually see a lot of her life. Unfortunately, we don’t have many items from the 1930s, when she was at the height of her fame. But in the rest of her archives, you can see that her life was steeped in music.
AVG-Carhif: Why is this one of your favourites?
Babette: To my knowledge, not many archives like this are preserved: personal archives of female lesbian musicians that are almost a century old. So for me, it’s important to preserve these small personal archives so that this side of history is also preserved. This is an archive from Fonds Suzan Daniël [, an LGBT+ archive centre in Belgium]. They don’t have their own storage space, so we store and manage their archives. The archive is accessible, but permission from Fonds Suzan Daniël is required.