During her 60-year singing career, Sophie Tucker, nicknamed “the last of the red hot mamas,” established herself as one of the great entertainers of the century. With her raucous singing style, she triumphed in every arena she entered, from theatre, film, and cabaret, to records, radio, and television. Whether she was belting out “hot” tunes such as “After You’re Gone” or ethnic tearjerkers like “My Yiddishe Mommie,” Tucker was a larger-than-life performer who made audiences laugh and weep. Exulting in her flamboyant image, she would appear on nightclub stages in 24-carat-gold gowns, mink coats, and diamond headdresses. She was perhaps the biggest recording star of the vaudeville era.
Born Sophie Kalish in Poland in January 1884, to Jewish parents fleeing Russia, she came to America when she was three. The young Sophie sang in her parents’ restaurant in Hartford, Connecticut, between cooking and waitressing duties. At age 16, she married Louis Tuck and expanded his name when she left him to pursue a career in New York (with her young son now in the care of her parents).
In 1905, Sophie Tucker won an amateur singing contest and took a $15-a-week job performing in a German beer hall. Plump and plain (but blessed with a stage presence once compared to “a battleship with a voice like 70 trombones”), she was forced to perform in blackface at Tony Pastor’s Music Hall. She was an immediate success on the vaudeville circuit, but then dropped this racist style when her costumes and makeup failed to show up one night—and was a smash in her own right. She began calling herself a ragtime singer, and got her first taste of stardom as a featured act in the 1909 Ziegfeld Follies.
In 1910, she made her first recording for Edison— “That Loving Rag.” Her first reaction to her recorded voice was, “My God, I sound like a foghorn!” Sophie’s maid convinced her to hear a new tune by the black songwriter and vaudevillian Shelton Brooks. The tune was “Some of These Days,” and it became her theme song. She recorded it in 1911 and on numerous subsequent occasions, including a 1926 version with the Ted Lewis band, which sold a million copies. “I’ve turned it inside out, singing it in every way imaginable,” she wrote in her autobiography, “as a dramatic song, as a novelty number, as a sentimental ballad, and always audiences have loved it and asked for it.” Another Shelton Brooks number closely associated with Sophie Tucker was “Darktown Strutters Ball.”
She formed a jazz band called Sophie Tucker and Her Five Kings of Syncopation, but disbanded it to star in musical revues such as Shubert Gaieties (1919) and Earl Carroll Vanities (1924). She remained associated with ragtime through the 1920s, with recordings such as “International Rag” and “Bugle Call Rag.” In the 1927 show La Maire’s Affairs, Tucker sang the classic “When the Red Red Robin Goes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along.” She had another million-copy seller in 1928, with “My Yiddishe Mommie,” on which she was supported by Ted Shapiro, her accompanist of 46 years.
Sophie Tucker was always at her best in live performance, being just as at home with jazz, blues, swing, and schmaltzy ballads as she was with ragtime. With the demise of vaudeville in the 1930s, Tucker spent more time in cabaret. She appeared in several unremarkable Hollywood musicals, including 1929’s Honky Tonk and Broadway Melody of 1938, and also starred on Broadway in the 1937 Cole PORTER musical, Leave Lt to Me.
As Tucker got older, she continued to perform across America and in Europe, mocking the ageing process with spicy specialty numbers such as “Life Begins at 40” and “I’m Having More Fun Since I’m 60.” The last of the red hot mamas died in February 1966, at the age of 82, in New York City.
Michael R. Ross
SEE ALSO: CABARET MUSIC; FILM MUSICALS; MUSICALS.
FURTHER READING
Freedland, Michael. Sophie: The Sophie Tucker Story (London: Woburn Press, 1978);
Segal, Harold. Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
L’m the Last of the Red Hot Mamas; Jazz Age Hot Mama: 1922–1929; Some of These Days.