Mamie Smith was an American vaudeville singer, dancer, pianist, and actress. As a vaudeville singer she performed in multiple styles, including jazz and blues. In 1920, she entered blues history as the first African American artist to make vocal blues recordings.

Dubbed "The First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald was the most popular female jazz singer in the United States for more than half a century.

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, educator and singer. He was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic and rhythmic complexity previously unheard in jazz.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

Samuel George Davis Jr. was an American singer, dancer, actor, comedian, film producer and television director. At age three, Davis began his career in vaudeville with his father Sammy Davis Sr. and the Will Mastin Trio, which toured nationally, and his film career began in 1933 and was a part of the “Rat Pack”

Melissa Fuell Cuther was the true definition of a trailblazer in the African-American community.

She was an outstanding, highly respected leader in southwest Missouri as a teacher, parks founder, board member, singer and author.

 She taught elementary classes in Joplin at Lincoln school from 1905 to 1912.

Ella Johnson was an American jazz and rhythm and blues singer.

Cabell Calloway III was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, bandleader, conductor and actor. He was associated with the Cotton Club in Harlem, where he was a regular performer and became a popular vocalist of the swing era.

Marian Anderson (February 27, 1897 – April 8, 1993) was an American contralto. She performed a wide range of music, from opera to spirituals.

Scott Joplin was an American composer and pianist. Joplin is also known as the "King of Ragtime" because of the fame achieved for his ragtime compositions, music that was born out of the African-American community. During his brief career, he wrote over 40 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas.

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life.

Charles McPherson is an American jazz alto saxophonist born in Joplin, Missouri, United States, and raised in Detroit, Michigan, who worked intermittently with Charles Mingus from 1960 to 1974, and as a performer leading his own groups.