Question: One of the first African Americans to host a national television variety show also performed what best-known composition from Peter van Steeden?

Context articles: Billie Allen
Home (When Shadows Fall)
Hard Labor: The First African Americans, 1619
Sherman H. Dudley
That's Country
African-American bookstores
Peter van Steeden
Van Merksteijn Motorsport
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Nat King Cole

Billie Allen (January 13, 1925 – December 29, 2015) was an American actress, theater director, dancer and entertainer.
 Allen was one of the first black actors and performers to appear on television and stage in the United States, at a time when those venues were largely closed to African Americans.
 During the 1950s, Allen became one of the first black entertainers to have a recurring role on network television when she was cast on CBS' "The Phil Silvers Show", beginning in 1955.
 She was one of the first African Americans to appear on television commercials in the U.S.
 She was also one of the earliest African American actors on daytime soap operas as she appeared in the mid-1950s as the character Ada Chandler on the popular daytime soap opera "The Edge of Night".
 Allen assumed the character of Ada Chandler, after yet another Broadway veteran and groundbreaking actor Micki Grant left the role as the original character "Ada Chandler."
 Allen was also known for her work on and off Broadway.
"Home (When Shadows Fall)" is a song written by Harry Clarkson, Geoffrey Clarkson and Peter van Steeden in 1931.
Hard Labor: The First African Americans, 1619 is a 2004 book by Patricia and Fredrick McKissack about the first African Americans to set foot in America.
Sherman Houston Dudley (1872 – March 1, 1940) was an African-American vaudeville performer and theatre entrepreneur.
 He gained notability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as an individual performer, a composer of ragtime songs, and as a member and later owner of various minstrel shows including the Smart Set.
 Dudley is also notable as one of the first African Americans to combine business with theater, by starting a black theater circuit, in which theaters were owned or operated by African Americans and provided entertainment by and for African Americans.
That's Country was a New Zealand country and western television variety show broadcast between 1976 and 1983 on TVNZ.
 The Show was hosted by Ray Columbus and featured local as well as international talent.
 Local talent included Ritchie Pickett, Peter Posa, Suzanne Prentice, Patsy Riggir and the Topp Twins.
 American artist Emmylou Harris and Dobie Gray also performed on the show.
African-American bookstores, also known as black bookstores, are bookstores owned and operated by African Americans.
 These stores often, although not always, specialize in works by and about African Americans and their target customers are often African Americans.
 Although they are a variety of African-American business, African American bookstores have often been closely tied to radical political movements including Marxism, Black Power, and pan-Africanism.
The first documented African-American bookstore was established by the abolitionist David Ruggles in 1834.
 One of the earliest African-American bookstores to achieve national prominence was Lewis Michaux's National Memorial African Bookstore, which operated in Harlem from the early 1930s to the middle of the 1970s.
 Michaux's store doubled as a meeting place for black activists, including most famously Malcolm X.
 The Black Power movement embraced black-owned bookstores in the 1960s and '70s as vehicles for promoting their ideology and creating radical political spaces in black communities across the United States.
 By the 1990s, African-American bookstores earned significant attention from more politically moderate and business oriented media outlets such as the magazine Black Enterprise.
 In the 2000s and 2010s, however, as independent bookstores of all kinds declined and bookstores chains and Amazon increasingly sold black-authored books, the number of African-American bookstores declined rapidly, dropping from over 250 to just over 70.
Peter van Steeden (April 4, 1904, Amsterdam – January 3, 1990, New Canaan, Connecticut) was a composer.
 His best-known composition, "Home (When Shadows Fall)", has been performed by many musicians, including Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Paul McCartney, Jackie Gleason, Cab Calloway, Eddie Cantor, Milton Burle, Theresa Brewer, Ella Fitgerald, the Fontain Sisters, Mary Martin, Gertrude Lawrence, Kate Smith, Maxine Sullivan, Giovanni Martinelli, Ethel Merman, Dinah Shore, and Sam Cooke.
Van Merksteijn Motorsport is a Dutch motorsport company active in both circuit racing and rallying.
 Established in 2008, under the ownership of Peter van Merksteijn Sr. and with Gerard Grouve as team principal, this motorsport company won both the LMP2 class title in the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans and in the gruelling the Le Mans Series in its first year of competition.
 Only one year later the team from Hengelo were again unbeatable when contesting the Dutch Rally Championship.
 For the 2011 season, the team has once more undertaken very ambitious plan: Peter van Merksteijn Jr. will compete in the World Rally Championship alongside Peter van Merksteijn Sr. driving a Citroën DS3 WRC.
Mary Eliza Mahoney (May 7, 1845 – January 4, 1926) was the first African American to study and work as a professionally trained nurse in the United States, graduating in 1879.
 Mahoney was one of the first African Americans to graduate from a nursing school, and she prospered in a predominantly white society.
 She also challenged discrimination against African Americans in nursing.
Nathaniel Adams Coles (March 17, 1919 – February 15, 1965), known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American singer who first came to prominence as a leading jazz pianist.
 He was widely noted for his soft baritone voice, performing in big band and jazz genres, and was a major force in popular music for three decades.
 Cole was one of the first African Americans to host a national television variety show, "The Nat King Cole Show".
 His recordings remained popular worldwide after his death from lung cancer in February 1965.