The pianist Marian McPartland has a sense of humor, but no one would ever accuse her of impudence. So there’s only one way to explain her behavior at a jazz party at the White House in the fall of 1998 at which she had the temerity to dedicate “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” to the nation’s commander in chief, our frequently misbehavin’ president Bill Clinton. Obviously, this was not McPartland herself making a statement; rather, she was channeling the spirit of the song’s composer, the Ayatollah of Irreverence himself, the great Thomas “Fats” Waller.
Waller speaks to the “naughties” in other ways: In the middle of a live 1938 version of another of his classics, “The Joint Is Jumpin,’ ” the Fat One goes into a spoken “rap” on the subject of violence against women: “No, don’t hit her, that’s my baby! No, don’t do that, that’s bad, son.” Another line could be directed at P. Diddy (or whatever he calls himself these days): “Check your weapons at the door.” Today, Waller likely would be billed as “Fat-C Wat-C,” but this is no mere rapper, or even a lowly Prince: The man in charge here is none other than the King of the Ivories himself.
Fats Waller lived only thirty-nine years, and didn’t become a star attraction and featured vocalist in his own right until his last decade. But ever since 1934, when the singer-pianist began his most celebrated series of recordings, the “Fats Waller and His Rhythm” sessions for RCA Victor, Waller has been a force in the parallel worlds of jazz and pop. His most important recordings have been in print in all formats from 78s to downloads (almost every note he ever recorded was reissued in the decade before his centennial). His songs have been endlessly sung by the great singers—even without the aid of the 1978 hit Broadway revue Ain’t Misbehavin’—and his catalogue of songs (at least the ones that he didn’t give away) is probably worth millions of times what it was in his lifetime. After Ellington, he has probably inspired more songbook and tribute albums than any other jazz composer. He is still regarded as one of the very greatest pianists ever to work in the jazz idiom, in a class with Hines, Tatum, Wilson, Powell, Cole, and Evans, and the infectious joy of his music has spread to players across the jazz generations, from Louis Prima to Louis Jordan to Marty Grosz.
Interest in Waller is not unique to the current era, even though it seems his spirit—as Marian McPartland demonstrated—is especially welcome in this age when jazz musicians, no less than everyone else, sometimes take themselves too seriously. Mama Waller’s very own little Fatsy-Watsy was a genuine giant of jazz and jocularity. His only competition for the crown of jazz’s number-one clown prince and comic genius was none other than Louis Armstrong; the sole pianist of his generation who could approach the fat man in sheer keyboard speed and precision and swing was Art Tatum. Like Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, Waller was at once a world-class clown and a true instrumental virtuoso; he was nothing less than a combination of Vladimir Horowitz and Buster Keaton.
Many were the resources that Waller had at his disposal. To begin with, there were always his piano skills. In an age when piano competitions between such eastern stride masters as Waller’s mentors James P. Johnson and Willie “the Lion” Smith were the equivalent of climbing in the ring with Mike Tyson, Waller established himself as the fiercest fighter of all. His hands were the pianistic equivalent of a Joe Lewis knockout punch, being massive implements, each of which could span an entire octave or even a 10th all by itself, so that he could augment his chords with unexpected inner pitches. Bill Dobbins has observed that Waller’s use of chromatic alterations and passing tones undoubtedly influenced even the titanic Tatum. In other words, when Fatsy-Watsy hit you with some of those big fat chords or those dramatic glissandos, son, you stayed hit. As friend and fan Dizzy Gillespie put it, “This nigger could eat up a piano!”
Then there were his songs. For Waller, it wasn’t a question of trying to come up with a melody but for his collaborators and publishers to pin him down long enough for them to tap into the treasure trove of tunes that effortlessly sprang from him like water from a faucet. He was a veritable one-man ASCAP, from blockbuster copyrights like “I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Squeeze Me,” “Ain’t Misbehavin,’ ” and the similarly themed “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now” to gems of the classic blues era like “Wildcat Blues” and “In Harlem’s Araby” and more serious laments like “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” and “Blue Turning Grey over You.” Indeed, his catalogue as a composer was so capacious that it exceeded his vast discography as a performer, and includes many a lesser-known gem that he composed but never recorded, like “My Heart’s at Ease” and “Ain’t-Cha Glad?,” not to mention “Since Won Long Hop Took One Long Hop to China.” There was also “I Had to Do It,” which he did, fortunately, perform on an extant radio broadcast. In 1955, when Louis Armstrong recorded his masterpiece album Satch Plays Fats, he was merely cementing a relationship of nearly thirty years; Satchmo probably recorded more compositions by Waller than by any other tunesmith, going back to the great Hot Five days and numbers like “Alligator Crawl” and “Georgia Bo-Bo.” Then again, Waller’s piano features, like “A Handful of Keys,” “Clothesline Ballet,” and “African Ripples,” rival Ellington, Morton, and Hines as some of the most amazing music ever written for the jazz keyboard.
Not least of Waller’s assets was his Rhythm, both in the lower- and uppercase senses of the word. “Fats Waller and His Rhythm” was a wonderfully tight band he maintained throughout his glory years on RCA Victor Records and NBC Radio. His sidemen were first-rate, particularly the brilliant trumpeter Herman Autrey and clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Gene “Honey Bear” Cedric, drummer Slick Jones, and the no less slick guitarist Al Casey, who survived well past the Clinton era, long enough to hear his name announced from the stage by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. They may never have gained the individual reputations of Duke Ellington’s or Count Basie’s sidemen, but they were all master players in the same class as the Duke’s or Count’s men. This was a polished yet swinging unit that perfectly complemented the leader’s pianistic and vocal contributions.
The final ingredient in the Waller mix was his voice; you’ll notice that his vocal contributions can’t be limited to a conventional definition of the term “singing.” Waller did so much more than strictly sing—he offered asides, often scathingly funny sideline commentary (the best lines may be in “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” “I’d work for you, I’d slave for you.… You want me to rob a bank? Well I won’t do it! / I’d be a beggar or a knave for you … whatever that is!”), he egged his soloists on (“Send me! Send me, son!” or “Beat it on outsy-woutsy!”); in short, he would stop at nothing to encourage his audiences to have fun. This is the hardest aspect of his music to take seriously—Waller’s vocals in particular defy any notion of seriousness—but he was one of the most creative vocalists of his or any other era. He could switch from song to speech at the drop of a hat, and croon in every register from falsetto to basso. He would bat his eyes and sound like an effeminate, fey tenor at one moment, then drop to a basso profundo (anticipating Carol Channing) the next, and then, for something completely different, get all deep and bluesy on the next. “Stop Beatin’ ’Round the Mulberry Bush,” a bit of nursery rhyme nonsense from 1938, finds our hero extracting mucho comic mileage by overemphasizing the Bs in “berry bush”
It’s often been observed that Waller’s vocals amount to parodies of many of the “lesser” works of Tin Pan Alley that he was importuned to record. It should be noted that some of the so-called dross in his repertoire originated from his own pen—the sentimental “Old Grand Dad,” for instance, turns out to be a Waller original. On the song “Inside,” recorded in April 1938 for Victor, he finds it impossible to “seriously” sing the line “let me have my cry.” I would instead suggest that the Fat Man’s versatile vocalizing was merely his way of improving the written material, and that he wasn’t so much making fun of those songs as with them. Waller had both a black belt in making merry and a PhD in having fun.
Born in New York on May 21, 1904, Thomas Waller began studying piano and organ at age six. Although his parents, a minister and a church organist, must be described as his first influence, Waller’s mastery of the keyboard blossomed under the genius tutelary of the Harlem stride masters, most famously Willie “the Lion” Smith (born 1897) and James P. Johnson (born 1891). (Later, he would pass along his knowledge to the young Count Basie.) By every account one of the most lovable personalities in all of American music, Waller had no trouble finding professional gigs as early as the age of fourteen. He worked as an accompanist to vaudeville acts, did rent parties in Harlem and all up and down the East Coast, and played for silent films.
Under the aegis of blues and jazz impresario Clarence Williams, Waller made his first recordings in 1922, and a few years later began composing songs in collaboration with the master lyricist Andy Razaf. He went on performing and partying from the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties, his fame steadily increasing. He recorded frequently in these years—as a solo performer, a bandleader, and as a sideman with all the leading black as well as white musicians of his era, including Red Allen, Jabbo Smith, J. C. Higginbotham, Jack Teagarden, and Benny Goodman. He also cut a series of piano solos for Victor that are today regarded as some of the definitive examples of the vigorous, two-fisted, and heavily swinging school of piano playing later dubbed “stride.” However, as pianist and jazz authority Dick Katz points out, “ ‘Stride’ is a slight oversimplification describing his work; close listening reveals subtleties that go beyond the mere bass-note-to-chord-and-back in the left hand that defines stride.”
In 1932, Waller capitalized on the novelty of a new medium with a little known song entitled “Radio Papa, Broadcastin’ Mama.” He actually made his first radio broadcast as part of Clarence Williams’s Blue Five in 1923. As Dan Morgenstern notes, Waller landed a regular show of his own on New York’s WABC, but began to become a radio institution while broadcasting all over the Midwest from Cincinnati’s WLIW in 1932. Once he started recording regularly for RCA (part of the same conglomerate that owned NBC), he launched a national series, oddly enough on CBS. When he made his first of several triumphant tours of Europe in the summer of 1938, he even appeared in an experimental television broadcast—he would have been a natural for that medium, even as he was for radio. By 1935, when Waller appeared in his first of three feature films, Hooray for Love, he had reached the pinnacle of his national popularity, which he would sustain for the remainder of his tragically short life.
The previous year, Waller had begun his most celebrated series of recordings, the Fats Waller and His Rhythm sides, done with a six- or seven-piece small band that perfectly framed the Great Man’s antics. In these Victor recordings (many currently available on BMG-Bluebird), Waller’s prodigious talent as a vocalist in particular came to the fore. His infectious joy and his irrepressible sense of humor transform many run-of-the-mill pop numbers into classics of jazz and jive. Then, too, Waller had a gift for lightly mocking the occasionally lachrymose lyrics he sang both by rendering them in various voices and by his irreverent asides. Although he became best known as a clown, both in his singing and playing, Waller could also function superbly as both a balladeer and a bluesman.
Fats Waller’s voice can be heard on a record for the first time on the 1927 “Red Hot Dan.” In the twenties, he had worked as accompanist for vocalists, from the great Ethel Waters to many obscure, long-forgotten femme singers then regarded as part of the classic blues trend of the era, as well as entertainers like his future partner Andy Razaf (recording under the name Johnny Thompson) and pioneering crooner Gene Austin. Waller began to assert himself as a singer beginning around 1931: That year he did a piano-vocal record of his own, “Crazy ’Bout My Baby,” which he also recorded as pianist and singer with Ted Lewis’s orchestra.
Dan Morgenstern feels that Waller would have made more vocal records in the early thirties—he certainly was singing frequently on the radio—but was avoiding entering the New York area lest his funds be attached by his ex-wife. Thus, unfortunately, he recorded comparatively little either vocally or instrumentally in the early thirties. Yet he certainly makes his presence known as a special guest on a 1931 date with Jack Teagarden, providing smart and snappy retorts to Teagarden’s low-key, bluesy vocals on “That’s What I Like About You” and Louis Armstrong’s hit “You Rascal, You.”
In the thirties, Armstrong and Waller reigned unchallenged as the two kings of music and comedy. Armstrong’s vocals were recognized as outgrowths of his trumpet style: the same kind of attack, the same use of slurs and glissandi and other devices that were interconnected with his brass playing. Waller couldn’t exactly approximate his piano style with his singing voice, but it seems appropriate that a pianist would have come up with the style that Waller forged: If he could go from very low to very high, from bass all the way to treble, with his frantic fingering, why not do the same with his titanic tonsils? If he could do several things at once, like play harmony and melody—not to mention rhythm—why not add one more with his voice? On most of the classic Rhythm sides, Waller has become a one-man equivalent of what it took both himself and Teagarden to achieve in 1931. He sings the main melody himself, while at the same time providing his own obbligato retorts. He’s a one-man Abbott & Costello, comic and straight man at the same time.
Beneath all that kidding around, Waller was a fairly well-schooled singer. There are many records on which he parodies concert baritones by dipping down into the bottommost registers: “Let’s Sing Again” and especially “The Curse of the Aching Heart” (“the soul [sole] within me died … not my shoes, though!”). Yet he could easily have done this “seriously,” without the gags, and become the great black romantic baritone of the period—sort of an American Hutch. He also employs a high squeaky voice at times (as on a brief aside in “Who’s Afraid of Love?”) and sometimes will do a moronic, nutty voice. More often, he’ll employ two or three different vocal registers on a single song, doing the main melody in his natural singing voice, jumping all around from high to low, stupid to wiseass, in his other vocal characters. He does so many voices on his classic “Christopher Columbus” he practically sounds like a one-man vocal quartet. (Indeed, some vocal groups, like the Ink Spots, at least in the beginning before they found their gold record formula, sound like an attempt to do with four jivey voices what Waller did all by himself.)
Often Waller will employ scatting, humming, or some other, unclassifiable wordless approach, as on the start of “The Old Plantation.” Other times, he’ll poke fun at serious, classical-style tenors by overenunciating his words, and sometimes he’ll rush the lyrics so that they sound silly—he does both on the 1936 “You’re Laughing at Me,” pronouncing it as “yourelaughingatme.” On the basis of the title alone, this Irving Berlin number (from On the Avenue) could have been Waller’s theme song: After the bridge, which ends with the line “humor is death to romance,” Waller interjects, “Ain’t no undertakers ’round here!”
Thomas Fats Waller and William Count Basie were born within a few months of each other; can you imagine if Waller had had the strength of character to create as long-running and perpetually self-renewing a career as Basie’s? Unfortunately, the undertakers would indeed be comin’ ’round before too long. Waller sounds so alive and vital on his commercial recordings, as well as on the radio transcriptions and live broadcast remotes that have been issued over the last sixty years, that it’s hard to believe he died while still a very young man. He announces on one 1935 radio performance, “Ladies and gentlemen: I want to let you know that I paid my alimony, and I ain’t misbehavin’ ”; however, in real life, he spent far too much time doing just that. Waller’s life was devoted entirely to playing and partying. As sideman Garvin Bushell put it, “Fats was a big baby. He never grew up.” As such, he completely avoided all aspects of adult responsibility, much to the consternation of his wives, children, managers, and employers.
His career never slowed down: In addition to two further films (King of Burlesque, 1936, and Stormy Weather, 1943), he continued to broadcast, returned to Europe, recorded prolifically, concertized in Carnegie Hall, and even wrote a Broadway musical (the 1943 Early to Bed, which ran for more than a year), all while unceasingly touring the country. But Waller simply could not stop “carrying on,” and was finally felled at the height of both his abilities and his fame. Substantially weakened by alcoholism, he died of pneumonia while returning from Hollywood to New York at the age of thirty-nine. At the end of “The Joint Is Jumpin’ ” the singer-pianist seems to be scolding himself when he says, “After all, we have to get serious once in a while.” But Fats never did.
In September 1943, Waller recorded what must be the most unintentionally moving song in his oeuvre. This was his final studio session, in New York on September 16, a piano-and-vocal date for V-Disc. There’s a famous story about the saxophonist Zoot Sims, who showed up at a gig completely inebriated but played brilliantly just the same. Asked how he could play so well when he was drunk, Sims replied “I practice drunk!” Waller is in a similar state here: He’s positively drunk off his ass, but you can tell that performing in such a condition is hardly a new experience for him. On this date, he laid down several songs from his show Early to Bed as well as new treatments of long-standing signature tunes for the benefit of servicemen, and his playing is so sloppy and his speech so slurred that the performances would never have been released by a commercial label. Waller’s GI audience, however, probably enjoyed how he was completely crocked and having such a good time.
“This Is So Nice It Must Be Illegal” is a terrific song from an excellent score. It’s a classic Fatsy-Watsy ode to high spirits and good times, making merry and making love, with an especially witty lyric by George Marion (“Quick! Let us kiss before it’s illicit / It can happen here!”). Waller had written and sung a million tunes like this before, but this recording is different. He’s so perilously close to falling off the piano bench that in light of his death three months later, it’s hard to enjoy the performance in the spirit in which it was intended. The forced jocularity makes the song almost painfully poignant. In retrospect, “This Is So Nice It Must Be Illegal” is Waller’s “Vesti la Giubba.” It’s impossible not to hear the tear behind the smile. He sounds like a man literally partying himself to death.
In the words of Dizzy Gillespie, “Fats Waller was one of my idols. I dug the way he was a master musician and a master pantomime artist. I patterned my career after that. I loved him and he loved me. Fats Waller influenced me not only through his music, but his whole personality, because he was funny, and then you could sit him down at the piano and close his mouth and he’d play. Everybody respected him. Art Tatum, James P. Johnson, Earl Hines, all of them respected Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller. That’s right! All you have to do is listen to ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ or ‘Honeysuckle Rose.’ Those tunes will last forever. [Take] the bridge in ‘Misbehavin’.’ Where did he get that from? Boy, I bet all the piano players right now love it. I haven’t heard anything in music since that’s more hip, harmonically and logically.”
Dinah Washington had such a passionate and aggressive singing style that any attempt to describe what she does invokes a series of metaphors so active that they’re almost violent: She digs into a song, she sings the hell out of a song, she attacks a song. Yet this kind of rough-and-rowdy treatment is hardly antisocial. Washington does right by her numbers by subjecting them to extremes of feeling, and she invariably leaves each piece of music better than when she found it. For all the vigor of her unsentimental approach, she does more to make a given song sound wonderful than any conventional chanteuse. When singing a love song, for instance, she’s virtually the only pop songstress who can sound tender without getting soft.
And that’s because she’s more than a pop singer, a blues singer, or a jazz singer; she’s one of the very few, very great vocalists who figure equally prominently in the development of all three of these genres of American music. She invests pop standards with a blues feeling, sings the blues with a jazz-based improvisational outlook, and can bring both a jazz and blues feeling into the most tepid of pop contexts.
Washington was the first artist who began with a blues foundation to eventually spread her wings far enough to conquer all of pop, transcending the boundaries of country music, gospel, and show tunes. Her major male counterpart in this area is Joe Williams, and both of them started in church music (although Williams in later years explained that he preferred to be thought of as a balladeer who also sang the blues rather than the other way around). Between the two of them they made it possible for artists of succeeding generations to slip more easily between the music of George Gershwin and Memphis Slim, and yet the only two successors who have produced a body of work even approaching Washington’s and Williams’s are Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin.
While Charles is given credit for “the Birth of Soul,” there’s no word other than “soul” that describes what Washington was singing in the forties and fifties—if Charles was the father, then surely Washington was at the very least the godmother. She was billed as “Queen of the Blues,” yet she actually presided over an empire that covered the widest possible stylistic territory. Indeed, we can go so far as to say that Washington can be considered the first soul/R&B singer as we understand the term today, a link between the classic blues singers of Bessie Smith’s era and the modern blues singers of the postwar era. Aretha Franklin made it clear how much Washington’s influence meant to her when she recorded Unforgettable, an album-length tribute to the Queen, in 1964.
Washington’s intonation is among the strongest in American music—like Fitzgerald, Stafford, Cole, and Tormé, she effortlessly hits every note dead-on. Unlike those other artists, she also has an arsenal of blues devices at her disposal—particularly growls and a wide range of darker tonal colors. Her time and her swing are faultless and yet her biggest asset isn’t strictly musical but attitudinal: Washington has a remarkable kind of confidence that comes through in whatever she sings—there’s always a feeling that she means every word. She can be haughty and defiant in one of her famous (and in some cases infamous) off-color 16-bar blues, she can be vulnerable in a traditional ballad like “More Than You Know” or a soul ballad like “This Bitter Earth.” Unlike most of her descendants, she knows well the value of subtlety; even though she brings gospel and blues feeling to the popular song, she never overdoes it in the fashion of those all-power and no-taste screechers like Whitney Houston and Celine Dion.
Blues singers, from Bessie Smith onward, often use distortion, but generally the message is apparent even if the words are garbled. With Washington, the lyric is always crystal clear—she can sing show tunes with all the clarity of an Ella Fitzgerald or even a Barbara Cook. As friend and fan Abbey Lincoln put it, “She was a great storyteller, you could understand every word she said, and she told you what was on her mind and what was in her heart. And as she grew a little older, all of that was in her songs too. ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ took on a life of its own when Dinah sang it.”
That confidence permeated her personal life as well. Washington knew exactly who she was, what she was capable of, and what she could expect. She didn’t take any nonsense from lovers or co-workers, as her seven or eight husbands (sources do not agree), or Brook Benton (the soul singer who attempted to record a disc of duets with her in 1959) will attest. Dan Morgenstern has reported how even the notorious Pee Wee Marquette, the pushy Birdland emcee who typically lorded it over the musicians who played there, was relegated to a mere flunky when Washington was in residence at the club. (A set of brilliant location recordings from Birdland, taped in 1962, was issued some thirty-five years later.) Washington always insisted on being referred to as “the Queen,” and had those words inscribed on her trunk. And that was even when she appeared in England, although “the English didn’t think that was particularly funny,” according to Abbey Lincoln. “But Dinah was a mischievous queen. Yes, she was, and it’s all in her music.”
Born Rutha (not Ruth, as historian Ted Ono has uncovered) Lee Jones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on August 29, 1924, the future Queen moved to Chicago with her mother at an early age, where she grew up playing piano and singing spirituals in church. Exposed to blues and pop songs through records and radio, Washington first worked in amateur shows in black neighborhoods around the Windy City. At the start of the forties, she spent several years with the famous gospel troupe led by Sallie Martin, eventually becoming the group’s lead singer. On her own, she worked several small Chicago clubs (once sharing a bill with Fats Waller) before she came to the Garrick Club. There she was heard by Lionel Hampton, who invited her to try out with his orchestra at the Regal Theatre. When she joined Hampton’s orchestra in December 1942, she also changed her name.
“It only took one exposure to the tart, take-me-or-leave-me Dinah Washington sound to realize that she had to be recorded,” producer-critic Leonard Feather recalled, but both the AFM ban and the shortsightedness of Decca Records, who had Hampton under contract, prevented her from recording with the big band. Fortunately, she did cut a series of solo sides for Keynote (produced by Feather and with Hampton graciously participating as sideman) and Apollo Records while still with the band. Washington went out as a solo act in the fall of 1945, and began recording for the newly formed Mercury Records in January 1946.
At this point, Washington was at the crossroads of many movements in American vernacular music. Ostensibly, like Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, she was a former band singer now working as a solo act. In the mid-forties, for the first time, many pop and jazz singers were being recorded in significant quantities, the same way the big bands had been—which indicates that singers were being recognized as the bread-and-butter of the music business.
Like Louis Jordan, Washington was a key figure in the evolution and gradual mainstreaming of the blues that occurred after the war. “Race” music, about to be rechristened “rhythm and blues,” had always been marketed to black audiences, but now it was pushing away from the margins and toward the center, to the point where, in the late fifties, a liberally watered-down version of R&B would come to dominate the youth music market. She was a key player in both trends: the big-band-nurtured pop singers who took over in the late forties and the R&B artists who supplanted them ten years after that. When she signed with Mercury the company was essentially still a start-up, and she and the label more or less grew up together.
Washington’s first session yielded results that were abnormally high even for her: two Ira Gershwin standards, “Embraceable You” and “I Can’t Get Started with You,” plus “When a Woman Loves a Man,” a slightly lesser-known 1934 song by Johnny Mercer, Bernie Hanighen, and Gordon Jenkins, and one riotous blues, “Joy Juice.” The next date, conducted by Gerald Wilson, yielded three titles: one new pop song, “You Didn’t Want Me Then,” another swinging blues, “Oo-Wee Walkie Talkie,” and another Gershwin standard, “The Man I Love.” (This last title has her altering the lyrics rather liberally: “We’ll build a little home … from whence I’ll never roam” and that “all other things aside, I’m waiting for the man I love.”)
The point is that, overall, the general quality of Washington’s output can be said to be somewhat higher than that of most female pop singers of the era. She did fewer forgotten and forgettable pop songs and a lot more blues. Indeed, her place at the crossroads ensured that every possible kind of song would turn up in her recording sessions—just looking at the years 1946 to 1952, we find classic pop standards along the lines of the Gershwin items I’ve already mentioned, as well as “I Thought About You,” “Mad About the Boy,” “Just One More Chance,” “Stairway to the Stars,” and “How Deep Is the Ocean.” There were also songs by African American writers who were considered part of mainstream Tin Pan Alley (such as Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin,’ ” and the René brothers’ ”I Sold My Heart to the Junkman”) and songs by white writers that are generally considered part of the black experience, like “Stormy Weather,” “Out in the Cold Again,” and “I Can’t Face the Music Without Singing the Blues” (which she recorded twice, both times incorporating Benny Carter’s “Blues in My Heart”).
What’s most impressive is how she treats the blues songbook with the same respect and understanding that singers like Sinatra were just beginning to show the classic show tunes: She preserves the classic blues songs from the twenties and thirties that she must have loved since childhood—“Trouble in Mind,” “When the Sun Goes Down,” the Louis Jordan hit “Early in the Morning,” the Bessie Smith–associated “ ’Tain’t Nobody’s Business but My Own,” and two harmonically similar blues songs that she helped to make into instant standards, Buddy Johnson’s “Since I Fell for You” and Percy Mayfield’s “Send Me Someone to Love.”
Washington’s penchant for the blues gave her recorded work a certain edge that other female pop (or even jazz) singers of the era didn’t have. Gershwin was considered somewhat high-minded then, but at the same time she was recording him, Washington launched a series of somewhat lower-slung blues numbers of a more explicit nature than most Tin Pan Alley songs. “Joy Juice” was the first of a series of alcoholic-drenched blues opuses: Here Washington sings of trying to get her man stoned (“nice and stewed” is how she puts it) so she can have her way with him. “Juice Head Man of Mine,” which might be viewed as a sequel, illustrates the downside of such a policy: By now her man insists on getting juiced all day long and comes home angry and disagreeable (not to mention “smelling like a skunk”); still, he does continue to satisfy her where it counts. “Lord, don’t let him lose his mind,” she pleads, “ ’Cause his juice-head love’s so fine.” (This from the same woman who sings Cole Porter’s “Why Can’t You Behave” and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “If I Loved You,” albeit the latter with a schlocky intro.) On the other hand, in “Good Daddy Blues,” another original, Washington boasts of how she got rid of “a no account, triflin’ man” who would “come home stumblin’ drunk,” and replaced this loser with a “cool, kind papa.” These songs belong in the same genre as Louis Jordan’s “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’re Gonna Get Drunk Again)?” and Lou Donaldson’s “Whiskey-Drinking Woman.”
As Leonard Feather, who composed more than few blues numbers for Washington, has observed, nearly all of these pieces use the strict 12-bar form and are in the key of C. In many cases, the meaning is overt, like the bedroom-based “Pillow Blues” and “Fine, Fine Man,” but others manage something of a double entendre. In her own “Long John Blues,” Dinah has eyes for a dentist built like a basketball player—over seven feet tall—who knows how to fill more than one kind of cavity. “You thrill me when you drill me,” she sings, happily paying him $10 for the privilege. In 1954 she came back with a sequel; this time she’s raving about her doctor, who happens to be named “Short John,” who gives her “medicine” that would drive most women “stark raving mad.”
In “TV Is the Thing This Year,” Washington is visited by her television repairman, who knows all the ins and outs of the fine art of twisting her dials. When he’s finished, she’s left panting, “My TV’s gonna need fixin’ ’bout this time every night!” Most licentious of all is a tale of the trombone player who, well, er, um, serenades her with his “Big Long Sliding Thing.” She likes him even better than the electric guitarist who plugs it into her amp or the pianist who tickles her keys. The most unlikely profession of all gets the double entendre treatment in “My Man’s an Undertaker.”
By the fifties, the pop business was becoming increasingly splintered—there now were three distinct music markets in the United States: pop, which was by now mostly singers and the occasional dance band; R&B, which had replaced the thirty-year-old term “race” music; and country and western, until then known officially as “hillbilly.” At the dawn of the forties, the big money was in pop, which was aimed at white people in urban, especially coastal, markets, but R&B and C&W were becoming increasingly profitable. For the most part, songs introduced in one market tended to stay there, but occasionally there were crossovers, which, at this early stage, occurred mostly in terms of songs rather than artists.
The most famous example was “Cold, Cold Heart”: It was written by Hank Williams, greatest of all cowboy poets, and became a pop hit when Mitch Miller had Tony Bennett record it. When the song caught on in mainstream pop, Dinah Washington recorded it for the R&B market, with a bluesy tenor sax and an arrangement not all that different from the way she sang things like “Double Dealing Daddy.” Bennett sang “Cold, Cold Heart” as if it had been written by Jerome Kern; Washington sang it as if it had been written by Buddy Johnson or Percy Mayfield.
Thus the same song had become a blockbuster in all three markets—with Bennett and Washington reinterpreting the song in their own way (Louis Armstrong’s Decca version can be considered the fourth major treatment). And none of these versions should be regarded as covers in the Little Richard–Pat Boone sense of the term. For a brief shining moment in American pop, the marketplace actually encouraged diversity and ethnic identity. As no less an authority on the subject of the blues than B. B. King has observed, “I remember when Dinah was considered R&B or ‘race,’ but she sang anything that anybody else sang, she just sang it her way.”
“Cold, Cold Heart” was only the most successful of Washington’s often brilliant reimaginings of mainstream pop hits in the early to midfifties. If that Hank Williams classic was the best, the worst was another “heart” song, “My Heart Cries for You,” orchestrated by Jimmy Carroll, more normally the right-hand man of Mitch Miller, who had produced the hit Guy Mitchell version for Columbia. Washington’s treatment limps along in a very pedestrian 3/4 time: Apparently if there was one thing Washington couldn’t sing, it was a second-rate waltz. Fortunately, other Washington covers of contempop hits were significantly better, such as her versions of two older songs very successfully revived by sweet bandleader Sammy Kaye, “It Isn’t Fair” and “Harbor Lights,” as well as Billy Eckstine’s “I Wanna Be Loved” and “I Apologize,” Sinatra’s “I’m a Fool to Want You,” and, among others, Kay Starr’s “Wheel of Fortune.” Washington also made excellent music with Clyde McPhatter’s “Such a Night” (covered ludicrously by Johnnie Ray and later, superbly, by Elvis Presley).
Up through the midfifties, Washington’s pop records, even those covering the tritest mainstream hits, could be things of extreme beauty. She also continued to do brilliant work in the R&B genre: There’s a particularly exciting set of nine titles from 1953 in which Washington is backed by a combo based on organ (Jackie Davis) and tenor (Paul Quinichette)—Washington and Davis are relentlessly intense, but “Vice Pres” Quinichette counterbalances them with his light, ethereal tenor tone. This combination is especially effective on blues and bluesish numbers with a sense of humor, such as “Fat Daddy” and “Lean Baby,” a Billy May instrumental outfitted with a witty lyric by Roy Alfred. Between “Long John,” “Short John,” “Fat Daddy,” “Lean Baby,” and the later “Fine Fat Daddy,” there’s something of an obsession with body size, which is ironic, considering how Washington died. In the last of these, with a tenor solo by her then husband, Eddie Chamblee, she tells her fine fat daddy not to reduce, because what matters “is the way you feel inside.” (Make of that what you will.) Dinah has no qualms about the apparent contradiction between swooning over a slender swain in one song and caressing a corpulent Casanova in the other—she would return to the topic in her own good time. She not only sings lustily of her fondness for giants and midgets alike, she doesn’t mind being an “Old Man’s Darling.”
Beginning in 1954, Washington began making records specifically for the jazz market. Supposedly this came about indirectly because of Norman Granz: In 1953, the famous impresario, who had been producing jazz sessions for Mercury since 1948, left the company and took his catalogue with him. Mercury then let producer Bob Shad start a new jazz subsidiary called EmArcy, and among his master strokes was the idea of recording purely jazz sessions with two of the greatest of all singers, Washington and Sarah Vaughan, who had more recently joined the label. The two singers recorded pop for Mercury and jazz for EmArcy.
Washington’s most important projects for EmArcy were two all-star jam sessions, After Hours with Miss D and Dinah Jams (both 1954). The former, which was the second to be released, spotlights Washington with two nouveau Ellingtonians, alto saxist Rick Henderson and the brilliant trumpeter Clark Terry; the second positions her with the nucleus of the superb Clifford Brown–Max Roach Quintet. Yet even when she locks horns with two ensembles comprised of some of the finest of all jazzmen, it’s clear that the swingin’est and the most intense musician of them all is Washington.
Curiously, “You Go to My Head,” from the Brown-Roach session, is a rare example of Washington being thrown. She starts with two choruses, the first a medium-slow ballad approach that is classic Washington; for the second, the tempo kicks in and a lightly Latin polyrhythm is introduced, and Washington, though swinging, nonetheless sounds slightly stilted. When she reconfigures the rhythm, she sounds like one of those pop calypso singers of the late fifties who deliberately “put the accent on the wrong syl-LAB-ble.” When singers like Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra do “You Go to My Head,” naturally enough they deemphasize the article “to.” For some reason, Washington gives all five words in the measure equal stress, and the result sounds somewhat awkward and ungainly—it’s hard to pinpoint what’s throwing her, since she’d dealt with Latin rhythms before and after; the bongos are in full force throughout the Quinichette organ sessions. (Judy Garland would later pick up on the idea of doing “You Go to My Head” in mambo time to greater effect in her famous 1961 Carnegie Hall concert.) For the rest of the two records Washington swings effortlessly.
While the core of her support had always been the black audience, these two albums represent the first time a producer had deliberately tried to package her for the jazz market—by the mid-fifties that was no longer the same thing. Washington’s vocals frame long tracks that are exclusively strings of extended solos by the heaviest hitters of the day; the format, right down to Bobby Shad’s opening announcements, seems borrowed from Norman Granz’s live and studio jam session recordings. This is a pure jazz format and Washington was one of the few divas of the jazz universe to try it. There are a few Ella Fitzgerald live JATP tracks scattered here and there that fit this profile, although I can’t think of anything like this (hot singer framing longish horn solos by heavyweights) by Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, or virtually any other singer.
If the two jam session dates are extreme jazz, there’s a remarkable album from 1954, For Those in Love (another EmArcy release), that mixes elements of pure jazz and traditional pop. Here, she gives out with twelve first-rate standards, most notably a recent Nat Cole movie song now elevated to that category, “Blue Gardenia.” There are very full solos by several musicians on each track, and the nonsensical but glorious “I Diddie” sports a tenor battle between Paul Quinichette and Budd Johnson, although none of the numbers is a ten-minute jam session. Further, there are also solidly arranged ensemble passages that showcase Washington spectacularly. The package was put together by emerging arranger-producer Quincy Jones. On “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” Washington goes down on “You don’t know how hearts burn” in a way that minimizes the word “burn” yet somehow stresses it at the same time—just burnin’ it up, baby. Coincidentally, each of the two sessions begins with Rodgers and Hart: “I Could Write a Book” and “This Can’t Be Love.”
After For Those in Love, Washington’s next important albums (recorded amid an ongoing slew of singles) arrived in the form of a pair of outstanding big band albums from 1955 and 1956: Dinah! and Dinah Washington in the Land of Hi-Fi, the latter part of a Mercury series that also included albums with this title by Sarah Vaughan and Patti Page. Both were conducted by Mercury house rabbi Hal Mooney, who saw to it that both the ballads and the swingers on each package were decked out in loud and bristling brass. There are no strings (except at the fifth and last of the sessions), and trumpets and trombones get most of the emphasis; these decorate her singing style like jewelry around her neck. The gem of the twenty-four tracks recorded at these sessions is “Nothing Ever Changes My Love for You,” a classic Marvin Fisher song also recorded by Nat Cole and instrumentally by George Shearing. Of the three, Washington and Mooney are the only ones who treat it to a cha-cha beat—which, incidentally, Washington handles with so much authority (“You Go to My Head” aside) that once again she picks up the mantle of La Regina del Mambo. (There’s an even better mambo from 1956, “Relax, Max,” which she tosses off without apparent effort, even though the time doubles in the bridge.)
Washington’s single best concept album is easily the 1957 Dinah Washington Sings Fats Waller, which includes tunes both written by and associated with the harmful little armful. The pairing of Washington with arranger-conductor Ernie Wilkins is an inspired meeting of singer and musical director, on a par with Wilkins’s work for the Count Basie–Joe Williams combination. Wilkins gives these twenty- and thirty-year-old jazz standards a tough, biting edge that suits Washington sublimely. Over the years we’ve heard her in countless settings with every kind of material (and the worst was yet to come), from easy listening strings and choirs to pure jazz, yet this is the best showcase she ever had for her formidable talents. Better than any other arranger, Wilkins frames this great artist at the very pinnacle of her powers.
The closest thing to a drawback (apart from a lame lyric to Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” which should have remained an instrumental) came from Washington’s insistence on spotlighting her husband and primary accompanist, Eddie Chamblee, not only on tenor (on which he’s not bad but still no Dexter Gordon), but as vocal duet partner on two tracks. Love can be a terrible thing—especially for Washington, who was by now doing her best singing on long-playing records, even though her relationships were barely even three-minute 45 rpm singles. It would be unkind to blame Chamblee, who is billed as musical director on Dinah Sings Bessie Smith, because that album isn’t as good as the Fats Waller package. It was apparently the label’s decision to back Washington with a quasi-Dixieland group that evokes the twenties (the worst offender is the ricky-tick drumming that persists throughout—especially since most Bessie Smith records don’t employ drums at all).
Although the Bessie Smith album is not nearly as good as the Fats Waller album, it’s still worth hearing, especially since, at times, the band almost anticipates the “avant-gutbucket” sound of Charles Mingus or David Murray. Washington’s singing is still first-rate, and the Queen is immediately on the same page as the late, lamented Empress of the Blues. At their best, tribute projects like these establish a continuum—Dinah Washington saluting Bessie Smith in 1958, then Aretha Franklin saluting Dinah Washington in 1964. Too bad there isn’t a contemporary blues-jazz-soul singer to honor Aretha the way Franklin did Washington or Washington did Smith.
Washington’s career was thriving in the late fifties. By this time she was also working regularly in Las Vegas, where she appeared at the Thunderbird and became friendly with Tony Bennett. “She never had a regular contract,” said Bennett. “She’d just show up one day, carrying her suitcases, and say, ‘I’m here, boss.’ And Dave Victorson, who ran the place, would say, ‘Well, go to work tonight.’ She’d go to the lounge, and the word would get out all over town, ‘Dinah’s here, Dinah’s in town,’ with no advertising or anything, and the place would be packed with all the gypsies, all the people on the Strip, the chorus girls and the chorus boys and all the guys that worked the tables.…”
In one of the great benefactions of the modern recording industry, the Japanese producer Kiyoshi Koyama gathered all of Dinah Washington’s Mercury recordings into a comprehensive, complete package, which came to seven boxes of three discs apiece and which was released at the dawn of the compact disc era in the mid-eighties. There are other complete retrospectives of major female singers, such as Sarah Vaughan (also by Koyama), and the Bear Family collections of Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney. It should be noted that actually sitting down and listening to the complete works of no other singer—with the exception of Billie Holiday—is as rewarding as listening this way to Washington. Maybe it’s due to her easy ability to switch between the blues and standards that her total output is just so listenable. Virtually everything on boxes one through five—1946 through 1958—is something to treasure and play again and again. Unfortunately, the average goes way down on box number six, 1959–60. In 1959, she began recording with producer Clyde Otis and arranger-conductor Belford Hendricks, whose mission apparently was to repackage Washington for the younger rock ’n’ pop doo-wop crowd. He succeeded immediately: The second track on their first session together was “What a Diff’rence a Day Made” (which she changed to “Makes”), and it became the single biggest song of her career—a breakthrough hit.
Otis and Hendricks backed Washington with large doo-wopping wordless choirs, irritatingly high-pitched strings, obnoxiously heavy-handed drumming (usually by Panama Francis, a fine jazz drummer who could have done much better if given the chance) emphasizing the annoying 16th-note triplets that were an unavoidable element of firstgeneration kiddie pop. What makes the sessions with Hendricks (who later did the same for Nat King Cole) particularly painful is that they primarily use great standard tunes. A forgettable doo-woppy novelty would be easy to pass over, even with Washington, but when you see titles like “It Could Happen to You,” “It’s Magic,” and “Unforgettable” (which became a hit for her) you simply have to listen. Washington’s singing is exemplary on all of these tracks, and one yearns for the invention of some twenty-first-century super karaoke machine that removes the original backgrounds and inserts some more appropriate accompaniment. Anything would be an improvement.
Most of Washington’s 1959–60 sessions are simply dreadful, although there are four marvelous duets with the Sam Cooke–like soul singer Brook Benton. The plan was to do an entire album of boygirl duos, but the two singers had a falling out and were barely able to get even these four tracks in the can. Even so, the two voices get a very congenial vibe going on “Baby (You’ve Got What It Takes)” and “A Rockin’ Good Way (To Mess Around and Fall in Love),” even if the backgrounds are as relentlessly annoying as ever. The seventh box is fairly dispensable for a different reason: Quincy Jones now replaces Clyde Otis as Mercury’s main A&R man, and it seems as if the most profitable things he could think of for her to do were stereo remakes of earlier hits. All three discs of box seven—nearly seventy tracks—were taped in 1961, perhaps the most prolific year of her career, but at the same time the least rewarding.
Apart from the megahit “What a Diff’rence,” the best-remembered song from the period is “This Bitter Earth,” credited to Otis and recorded by the Washington-Otis-Hendricks trio in 1959. The Mercury track is one of Hendricks’s more palatable arrangements, but there’s a live version from Birdland in 1962 that’s considerably better—and even more bitter. The studio single has a big string section, but the live one is simply Washington and pianist Joe Zawinal. Like all her live performances, the Birdland treatment is somehow looser yet at the same time more intense. It’s less of a torch song than a scorch song—Washington is positively inflammatory. Her second chorus is more decorous, and Zawinal’s playing stays even closer to the wellspring of the blues. If someone were to tell you it was Ray Charles himself playing for Washington, you’d have no reason not to believe it. In his music and lyrics, Otis aptly harnessed Washington’s spirit; the mood is bitter but not self-pitying. At the end, she helps the song deliver a minor note of optimism, a hint of sunshine peeking through the clouds, with the line that “this bitter earth may not be so bitter after all.” It was one of her most affecting performances, a song that everybody remembers. She sang it dozens of times in her last five years, and it’s been performed in her memory by Aretha Franklin, Lou Rawls, Nancy Wilson, Etta James, and Jimmy Scott—and that’s far from all.
In a nutshell, the received wisdom regarding Washington’s post–“What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” and post-1959 career is that she did nothing worth listening to (like post-Riverside Wes Montgomery or Nat King Cole in his “Rambling Rose” period). In reality, this theory only holds water until you listen to the records. When she was lured away from Mercury to Roulette early in 1962, they had no intention of packaging her for lowest-common-denominator pop. Indeed, the point of albums like Back to the Blues, her fourth for Roulette, was to prove that her newfound pop audience wouldn’t desert her if she returned to the hard-hitting sounds that had put her on the map in the first place.
In her two years at Roulette, Washington concentrated on albums as opposed to singles, and recorded a total of seven basic sets for the label; these have been frequently reformatted, rehashed, and reanthologized into dozens of compilations and “best of” collections over the last forty-five years, until Mosaic Records came out with a definitive, five-CD collection in 2004. Washington launched her association with Roulette with a set of swinging standards titled Dinah ’62, which included such milestones as “Destination Moon,” “Coquette,” “Miss You,” and “A Handful of Stars.” She followed this with two collections of ballads orchestrated by the gifted Don Costa. Dinah in Love consisted of romantic numbers treated considerably more straight-ahead than “What a Diff’rence.” Drinking Again was a more melancholy gathering, which introduced the titular Johnny Mercer classic and included an aching, blues-inflected “Lover Man” and “The Man That Got Away.”
Nineteen sixty-three saw Washington’s most powerful Roulette set, Back to the Blues, as her scorching treatment of “The Blues Ain’t Nothin’ ” mightily testifies. The underappreciated arranger Fred Norman, who crafted both Dinah ’62 and its more pop-oriented follow-up, Dinah ’63, here showed what he could do with an orchestra full of jazz all-stars and blues intentions. Dinah ’63 combined pop standards with contemporary hits, including a particularly earthy treatment of Mercer’s “I Wanna Be Around” that likewise travels back to the blues.
Dinah ’63, was, sadly, the last Washington release to come out during her lifetime. Billie Holiday and Judy Garland were probably the two most self-destructive divas of all time; Washington did not share that impulse, yet she died younger than either of them, at thirty-nine. It wasn’t narcotics that messed her up, but legal substances from a drugstore and a liquor store taken in a lethal combination. Throughout her life, she was continually preoccupied with losing weight, and apparently no one ever told her not to mix alcohol and diet pills. Unlike many musicians, Washington didn’t die trying to get high. She died trying to get thin.
When that happened, on December 14, 1963, Roulette still had two albums in the can. The first, eventually issued as In Tribute, may have been planned as Dinah ’64, since it consists primarily of more or less recent songs (as well as Jimmy Van Heusen’s poignant, older “Funny Thing”) and, like its annual predecessors, was arranged by Fred Norman. The final project, a third sublime collection of ballads with Don Costa, was released simply and appropriately as Dinah Washington. Although built around classic songs like “Just One More Chance” and “I’ll Never Stop Loving You,” it also included newer pieces such as “Don’t Say Nothin’ at All” and Washington’s own “To Forget About You.” “A Stranger on Earth” was a haunting track that, like “I Wanna Be Around,” had morbid relevance after Washington’s death.
“Dinah was strong-willed and forceful,” as fellow Hamptonite Betty Carter once noted. “Her personality was such that whenever she was around, performing or not, you knew it.” She was also the most soulful voice and persona that popular music has known. Even the lesser offerings of the Queen of the Blues deserve to be treasured.
In her own original blues “Love Me with Misery” (1950), Washington sings,
Say you always tell me I’m evil and salty
And got them old funny time ways
But you’re gonna miss my salty evilness
One of these old rainy days.
She was right.
It’s a long, long story,
Do you want to hear it?
If not I’ll tell it anyway.
—Ethel Waters, “Second Hand Man” (Easton-Waters, 1929)
By any standards, Ethel Waters was a pioneer, and generally speaking, there are two reasons why we listen to pioneers today. First, to see how much they influenced subsequent artists and gauge exactly what they introduced that was eventually adopted into the standard vocabulary. Second, to see what they did that didn’t catch on, and experience whatever still remains unique to this artist and her or his generation. Ethel Waters doesn’t lack for acolytes: Bing Crosby, Lee Wiley, Mildred Bailey, and Jimmy Rushing, among many others, named her as a direct influence, and one hears distinct echoes of her immaculate, precise articulation in the singing of Frank Sinatra; Bobby Short apparently memorized every note she ever recorded (most famously “Guess Who’s in Town?”). All these are good reasons for listening to Ethel Waters. A better reason is that she is considerably bigger than the sum of those she influenced: Waters still has something to say to us, ninety years after she cut her first disc. The best reason is because most of her records still sound so good.
Apart from Sophie Tucker and some of the early classical divas, Waters may well have been the first truly great female vocalist to make a record, and many of the principles she developed in the early twenties took hold and influenced multiple generations of jazz, blues, and pop singers—indeed, are even in use today. And then again, many are not. As she sings in the 1929 “Better Keep an Eye on Your Man”: “Everybody’s not like me.”
Waters showed us that there were two Great American Songbooks available to jazz and pop singers: One is Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, and company; the other is Clarence Williams, W. C. Handy, and, later, Robert Johnson et al. In the work of both groups, the performance takes precedence over the source material. Yet, also thanks to Waters, we know that these two American idioms are deeply connected to each other: One of her descendants, Dinah Washington, can take a song by Rodgers and Hart and make it sound as if it were written by Memphis Slim. Although I’ve never heard her do it, I don’t doubt that Eydie Gormé could take something by Muddy Waters and make it sound like Cy Coleman.
Yet although these two different songbooks exist, there are relatively few artists who take advantage of them equally—among the few who do are Washington (Waters’s “Oh Joe, Play That Trombone” directly prefigures Washington’s “Big Long Sliding Thing”), Joe Williams, Ray Charles, Etta Jones, Dakota Staton, and, among the few Caucasian artists who belong in this category, Peggy Lee and Kay Starr. Ethel Waters, to borrow Gary Giddins’s very apt phrase, was the mother of them all. She was more than a jazz or blues singer; her many recordings of popular songs lacking those elements are no less remarkable than those that use them. Her treatment of “Love Is the Thing,” formal yet funky, diction so impeccable it almost sounds like an English accent, illustrates her influence on Mabel Mercer.
It would almost be too trite to call Waters the original crossover artist, although she surely was the first African American female entertainer to completely be welcomed into the hearts of the great white audience: to sell to white buyers on the mainstream record labels, to headline on Broadway, to make talking pictures. It’s all true, yet Waters was a crossover in a deeper, more important sense. Everything about her screams convergence. She emerged at the dawn of the Jazz Age, when jazz, blues, and the popular song were all being refined into their present forms and packaged for popular consumption, first black and then white. When both of the songbook traditions were in their embryonic form, Waters not only brought them together but helped influence the future shape of both, in terms of their interaction with each other and as distinct, individual entities. Even today, well after her centennial, she remains the only major vocalist who could sing the blues with rolled Rs.
Waters was born on Halloween 1896, in Chester, Pennsylvania. (She usually gave 1900 as the date, but 1896 is believed to be correct.) She talked about her early life with remarkable frankness in her 1951 memoir His Eye Is on the Sparrow, a book that surpasses Billie Holiday’s better-known Lady Sings the Blues for candor and readability. (When first published, Waters’s book was a best seller, although Holiday’s book became more iconic in the long run.)
Waters first sang in church, and in her teens worked as a domestic. She began performing in amateur shows and saloons, first around her native city and then Baltimore, and began gradually working her way up the ladder of black showbiz. By 1917, when she moved to New York, she was already a headliner, regularly playing the “colored” vaudeville circuit. She got into a touring revue called Hello 1919, which initiated her gradual transition to what was then known as the legitimate theater. In 1920, the equally young Mamie Smith recorded “Crazy Blues” and thus launched the vogue for “race” records: black artists (usually women) singing songs by black composers for purchase by the emerging black middle class. Waters was in a good place, career-wise, to benefit from this turn of events, and in 1921 was recruited to make a commercial recording by a short-lived firm named Cardinal Records. Their association lasted exactly one disc, Cardinal 2036, containing two dance-driven titles, “The New York Glide” and “At the New Jump Steady Ball.”
Not long afterward, she first met her longtime accompanist and friend Fletcher Henderson, who was then employed by Black Swan Records. Henderson later related, “I was walking along 135th Street in Harlem one night, and there, in a basement, singing with all her heart, was Ethel. I had her come down and cut four sides, of which two, ‘Down Home Blues’ and ‘Oh Daddy,’ became such hits that we were made.”
The first thing one notices about the earliest Waters records, her acoustic era sessions for Cardinal and Black Swan, is how thin her voice sounds. At this time, she was nicknamed “Sweet Mama String-bean” in vaudeville, and her voice was equally slender; given time, both her frame and her chops would fill out considerably. Even given the limitations of the technology, her high pipes reproduced well. It’s been said that high voices reproduced better in the acoustic process, while electrical recording favored low ones, explaining why tenors were gradually superseded by baritones like Bing Crosby. Waters, like Al Jolson, was aware enough of the technological transitions to take full advantage of the difference; it’s clearly more than an accident or even the natural process of aging that her voice is considerably lower in 1931 than it was in 1921.
Waters’s career trajectory established a pattern that many other African American artists would follow—or at least aspire to: first, gaining the love and support of the black audience; then, using that as a platform to eventual acceptance by the larger white audience. (Her only notable predecessor in this accomplishment was Bert Williams, the short-lived Ziegfeld star.) Waters shows much of her mature style even in her first recordings; in her early acoustic period, the recording process wasn’t sufficiently refined to capture nuance or vocal timbre, but she was astute enough to get her personality across in this primitive medium. She had the stuff in abundance. For one thing, she would cleverly refer to herself in her own records. On “No Man’s Mama” (1925) she refers to herself as “sweet Miss Waters,” while it’s “Ethel” on both “Ethel Sings ’Em” (1925) and “You’ve Seen Harlem at Its Best” (1931). There was never any doubt as to who was singing.
As Henderson reports, her first pairing for Black Swan, “Down Home Blues” and “Oh Daddy,” was an unexpected success, selling 100,000 copies. Despite the title of the first, neither of these two items was strictly a blues in the traditional sense, as the form would be defined and codified two years later by Bessie Smith; Waters herself describes Smith as “the Empress” in her 1925 “Maybe Not at All.” But neither is “Down Home Blues” strictly a standard pop song—it pays to remember that both forms were still in the process of evolution in 1921; there are allusions to blues form, even if the second line isn’t repeated exactly, and also to blues harmony. “Memphis Man” and “Midnight Blues” of 1923 come closer to the authentic blues requirements—one can even imagine them being sung by any of the Smith girls. But although Waters would cut relatively few numbers that were strictly in the classic 12-bar blues format, virtually everything she did sing had at least an element of the blues. Sometimes it was something inherently musical, but equally often it was found in the lyric content—a word or phrase in the text that spoke of the “race” experience.
The earliest Waters sides are divided not only between the blues and standard song form, but between those with band accompaniments and those with only piano. The band records, naturally, have been particularly prized by jazz fans over the decades, particularly the many titles with Henderson and his star players, most notably cornetist Joe Smith and tenor Coleman Hawkins. There are several sessions employing the rare instrumentation of piano, bass saxophone (at least once played by Hawkins), and trumpet.
It’s a major disappointment, however, that Waters never recorded with Louis Armstrong. Oddly, even though the trumpeter seems to have accompanied every two-bit pseudoblues singer of the era—not to mention the great Bessie Smith—he never worked with Waters. However, in 1923 she recorded “If You Don’t Think I’ll Do, Sweet Pops (Just Try Me),” a blues song credited to Louis and Lil Hardin Armstrong and featuring his future nickname in the title. Waters would later make what might be considered the first two Armstrong tribute records, “West End Blues” (1928) and “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby” (1932); in the latter, she launches into a full-scale Pops impression. She also recorded “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” already Armstrong’s theme song, in 1934.
One shouldn’t make the mistake of overlooking Waters’s piano-only sessions; the acoustic years in particular are graced by any number of duets with such accompanists as Henderson, J. C. Johnson, Fats Waller (on Sidney Bechet’s “Pleasure Mad” and his own “Back-Bitin’ Mama” in 1924), and her longtime accompanist Pearl Wright. These voice-and-piano items directly anticipate such later jazz vocal-piano masterpieces as Ella and Ellis and The Intimate Ella, as well as the June Christy–Stan Kenton Duet.
On a similar note, in 1926 Waters recorded a fascinating series of sessions in collaboration with a group of well-known pianist-composers, both black and white, including Sammy Fain on “If You Can’t Hold the Man You Love” and Maceo Pinkard on “Sugar” and “I Wonder What’s Become of Joe.” Best of all are the songs by and/or with Shelton Brooks, one of the first successful African American composers, in which she seems to be joined by the songwriter himself in a dialogue at the start of “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” and other arias of sexual humiliation such as “Throw Dirt in Your Face” (the title refers to a gravedigger’s assignment, “a woman whose daily occupation is stealin’ other women’s men”), “After All These Years,” and “Bring Your Greenbacks.” A year and a half later, she completed her Shelton Brooks series with a rendition of his best-known work, “Some of These Days,” that even Sophie Tucker would admire.
Waters herself sang a perfect description of what she did in “You’ve Seen Harlem at Its Best,” a 1934 song by Cotton Club staff writers Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh:
Then when Waters croons
Those slightly earthy tunes
[spoken aside: You’ve had your money’s worth!]
You’ve seen Harlem at its best.
Crooning refers to a mainstream pop style identified most strongly with Bing Crosby, while “slightly earthy tunes” alludes to the risqué and openly erotic quality of many of the double entendre numbers that she sang. Waters was well aware that not all blues are sexual in nature and not all songs about sex are blues. Cole Porter and Noel Coward managed to indulge in all kinds of lusty lyrics without going anywhere near the 12-bar pattern; in fact, the next number to be recorded by Waters after “Harlem at Its Best” was “Miss Otis Regrets,” a classic slice of Porter that deals with love in vain, murder, the heat in the kitchen, and hellhounds on the trail every bit as eloquently and explicitly as anything by Robert Johnson.
Neither the 12-bar blues form nor the standard AABA pop song were rigorously set in stone in these years, and neither were the boundaries between these two developing forms so rigid. For instance, “Sweet Man” (1925) and “Heebie Jeebies” (1926) both open with a full chorus of jazz band instrumental (future generations would put this break in the middle of the two vocal choruses), so that it blurs the distinction between the two basic species of mainstream pop record, the dance record (band—vocal—band) and the personality record (vocal—band—vocal). Convergence and crossover seemed perfectly natural, with Waters’s jazz techniques as a common ground, an element that could be applied to either blues or pop.
Waters probably didn’t invent the modern jazz vocal form, but she certainly perfected it and inspired many generations to take it up. She typically starts with the verse, sings the first chorus relatively straight and then treats the second chorus more playfully—jazzy, so to speak. It’s so simple it’s almost not worth being identified as a musical format, but that’s just the point: This is the single most basic outline of how a jazz-pop singer operates. Doubtless, Armstrong would have been doing this had he been singing two choruses in the twenties, but as it happens, Waters was the one who popularized this approach, and everyone seems to have learned it from her, from the three major white goddesses of the thirties—Mildred Bailey, Lee Wiley, and Connee Boswell—to all the important black singers, such as Maxine Sullivan, Helen Humes, Ella Fitzgerald, and even Billie Holiday, although she denied it.
Waters went on experimenting, not only with song and blues structure but searching for novelty within the recording form itself. Both the 1925 “You Can’t Do What My Last Man Did” and the 1926 “Pallet on the Floor” open with a patch of dialogue between Waters and a male speaker (in the first it’s one “Slow Kid” Thompson), and “Last Man” on the whole is very dialoguey, with Waters blurring the distinction between speech and song. At one point, she affects an outrageously unnatural upper-class accent (“you just cahn’t!”), and then follows this by exclaiming “Come get me, Ethel Barrymore!” She virtually invents rap on the 1924 “You’ll Need Me When I’m Long Gone” (in which she refers to her misbehaving lover as “Rudolph Vaselino”) and then again on “Weary Feet” (1926), in which she addresses a long speech directly to her overextended pedal extremities. The best of all Waters raps is the 1935 “Thief in the Night,” a “signifying” and “ranking” series of eloquent put-downs that all but defies summarization; the best line is “You’re everything that begins with the letter S and the letter B!”
If Waters’s use of spoken raps can be described as words without notes, her use of scat singing amounts to notes without words. She hints at the technique as early as 1922 in “That Da Da Strain” and then develops it more fully, following Armstrong’s example, in “Guess Who’s in Town?” (1928), “My Kind of a Man,” and “I Got Rhythm” (1930), on which she exchanges phrases with trumpeter Manny Klein, in addition to the more directly Armstrongian “West End Blues” (1928) and “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby” (1932). Speaking of impressions, the 1925 “Maybe Not at All” interpolates Waters’s devastatingly on-target approximations of both Clara Smith (hot and staccato, clipped delivery) and Bessie Smith (“Get ready for the Empress,” she avers as the tempo grinds down to a slow drag).
Waters even dabbled in spiritual music, anticipating the later gospel movement. “You’re Mine” uses a church-style organ and several references to the Almighty, while “He Brought Joy to My Soul” is a pure spiritual, rendered with a male vocal quartet but otherwise a cappella in the down-home church tradition. On the other hand, “St. Louis Blues” employs the Cecil Mack Choir to humorously accentuate the spiritual side of the Handy masterpiece. Both of these selections prefigure Waters’s last twenty years, in which she devoted considerable time to religious activities, including tours with the Reverend Billy Graham. Yet it must be confessed that she spent more time with the profane than the sacred.
Waters also all but invented the risqué double entendre blues—all those “slightly earthy tunes”—and no one ever did them better. She also was the master of the technological metaphor: the 1925 “Loud Speakin’ Papa (You’d Better Speak Easy to Me),” which employs a radio conceit—“I’m gonna twist your aerial and bust your horn”—and the 1926 “Refrigeratin’ Papa (Mama’s Gonna Warm You Up),” in which she vows “Mama’s gonna make you hot” and turn her ice-cold lover into a red-hot papa. Eventually, lyricist Andy Razaf became her principal accomplice in this pursuit, as on their all-time classic “My Handy Man,” while the self-penned “Second-Hand Man” (1929) is nearly as suggestive. On both of these, the text is never directly dirty, yet Waters conveys a broad range of erotic expression purely through tone of voice, sly emphasis, and other kinds of innuendo. Then, too, she can do the same thing in reverse, taking something written to sound somewhat off-color and cleaning it up in grandiloquent fashion, as on “Take Your Black Bottom Outside,” which she rephrases as “remove your dark anatomy outside.”
Waters’s self-satirizing sexpot was an obvious influence on Mae West. In fact, her records were so closely studied by other singers that it’s hardly surprising she introduced many jazz standards, starting with “There’ll Be Some Changes Made” in 1921. In the twenties alone, Waters put a whole lot of standards on the jazz map, songs like “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Dinah” (both 1925), “I Found a New Baby,” “Sugar,” “Heebie Jeebies,” “I’m Comin’, Virginia” (all 1926), “One Sweet Letter from You” (1927), and even “Am I Blue,” which was written for her in her first film appearance, the 1929 On with the Show!
It’s also easy to see what other singers learned from her: Billie Holiday claimed not to like Waters, yet she undoubtedly studied the 1922 “Ethel Sings ’Em” (the “ ’em” refers to the blues), which includes the line “Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on,” which Holiday later worked into “Fine and Mellow.” (Holiday’s “Billie’s Blues” also paraphrases from Waters’s 1924 “Craving Blues” and 1925 “Down Home Blues.”) Waters’s “Sugar” was all but literally remade, almost inflection by inflection, by Lee Wiley, starting with the verse and two choruses, although the younger singer for some reason elected not to employ the witty special second chorus lyrics that Waters sang. Her 1927 “Someday Sweetheart” is the obvious model for the Bing Crosby version of seven years later, and likewise her “I’m Coming, Virginia” strongly influenced Crosby on one of his first solo vocals, while the 1925 blues “Shake That Thing” ends on a syncopated trill that can only be described as Crosbyesque.
In 1927 Waters made her “legit” Broadway debut in Africana, an all-black revue with a score written for the most part by black composers and longtime Waters associates such as J. C. Johnson, Andy Razaf, and Will Marion Cook. Africana gave her plenty of opportunities to ply her specialties, many of which did not originate in this production but were interpolated into the score. She returned to Broadway in Blackbirds of 1930; although this Lew Leslie revue did not duplicate the blockbuster success of his original Blackbirds two years earlier, it gave Waters the chance to introduce two Andy Razaf–Eubie Blake standards, “You’re Lucky to Me” (another number Lee Wiley learned from her) and “Memories of You.” Rhapsody in Black (1931) was her third all-black Broadway revue. She commissioned an outstanding score from Alberta Nichols and Mann Holiner, a gifted lyricist who would later work as radio producer for both Sinatra and Crosby. This score included their charming “You Can’t Stop Me from Loving You” (with the line “You can put Lux in my cornflakes”) and an early incarnation of “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” (which, with some additional kibitzing by Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin, became a blockbuster hit in 1936, though not, unfortunately, for Waters).
She would land her single biggest hit song not on Broadway but in Harlem. In 1933, she was asked to headline at the Cotton Club for their spring revue. At first, she turned them down (not a smart move, considering the wiseguys who owned it didn’t like to take no for an answer), but changed her mind when she heard the song that Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler were then working on, which was called “Stormy Weather.” She made a few changes to the rough draft of the piece, pruning away some extraneous material, and both Waters and “Stormy Weather” were an immediate sensation when The Cotton Club Revue opened. Eventually, three major black divas would make career pegs out of “Stormy Weather”: Waters, Duke Ellington’s number-one singer, Ivie Anderson, and, of course, Lena Horne, with whom in the long run it would be most associated. But it was Waters who put it over and made it one of the most popular songs of the entire Depression era.
The aftereffects of the success of “Stormy Weather” helped bring her to a level that no black female singer had ever achieved: She soon had her own radio series, and was perhaps the first black diva to headline an otherwise white show on Broadway. In 1929, she had recorded the finest version of Irving Berlin’s original spiritual “Waiting at the End of the Road”; in 1933, the composer caught her at the Cotton Club and was so impressed that he brought her into his new revue, As Thousands Cheer, that fall. Although she had no interaction with any of the white headliners, she was given the full star treatment, with separate-but-equal billing.
She caused a further sensation with three all-time Irving Berlin classics: “Heat Wave” was pure tropicalia fluff, whereas “Harlem on My Mind” and “Supper Time” were specifically Afro in content. The first of those was comic, poking fun at a “colored” chorus girl turned toast of Paree, i.e., Josephine Baker; the second was scathingly tragic, depicting the aftermath of a lynching in the Deep South. It was the most stunning protest song since Razaf and Blake’s “Black and Blue” (also recorded unforgettably by Waters) from the 1929 Hot Chocolates, and perhaps the most disturbing number in a Broadway musical until the sixties.
She continued to proceed where few, if any, black performers had been allowed to tread before. In 1933, she co-starred with the six-year-old Sammy Davis Jr. in the Vitaphone two-reeler Rufus Jones for President. It was a surreal, wild minstrel show of a short subject, only with authentic Negro performers (not corked-up Caucasians), but Waters was the acknowledged standout with a sensual and funny rendition of “Underneath the Harlem Moon” (in which she referred to her people as “we schvartzes”) that truly transformed the ridiculous into the sublime. Rufus Jones was followed by another short subject (Bubbling Over, 1934), and then a speaking and singing role as well as a number (“I Ain’t Gonna Sin No More”) in the feature Gift of Gab.
But her biggest step forward at this point was returning to Broadway in 1935–36 in a second successful mainstream revue, At Home Abroad, with a score by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. She made a big impression with “Thief in the Night,” the jungle-set “Hottentot Potentate” (in which she refers to herself as “the Empress Jones”), and the Jamaica-set “Steamboat Whistle.” In both of the latter, she worked with scat savant Leo Watson and the Spirits of Rhythm. In “Got a Bran’ New Suit,” she did something even more radical in that the producers allowed her to share the stage with a white woman, dancer Eleanor Powell.
Waters next became just about the first pop singer of any race who succeeded in getting the world to take her seriously as a nonsinging actor in a nonmusical drama, namely DuBose Heyward’s Mamba’s Daughters (1939). The play was well received at the time, but since then has been passed over along with the rest of Heyward’s works; even Porgy is only remembered as the source of Gershwin’s opera. Waters had already recorded a song called “Porgy” by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, which had been directly inspired by Heyward’s Porgy, years before Porgy and Bess. Aida Ward introduced it in Blackbirds, but Waters made the definitive recording—actually she cut it both in 1930 and again in 1932 for the Brunswick Blackbirds studio cast album. There was, in fact, one song in Mamba’s Daughters, “Lonesome Walls,” with a lyric by Heyward (virtually his only non-Porgy-related popular song) and a melody by Jerome Kern (just about the closest that American classicist ever came to writing a blues), that she recorded marvelously for Bluebird in 1939.
At her pinnacle, Waters was earning $5,000 a week. It’s hard to think of another big star from the early twenties who was doing as well decades later. Even Jolson and Bessie Smith were considered passé by then. Yet although Waters was one of the best-known names on Broadway, she was subject to the standard brutal treatment from the segregationist Jim Crow society, both in the South, where racism was overt, and in the North, where it was more subtle but nonetheless still omnipresent. (On “Georgia Blues,” she sings with almost disturbing complacency about riding the “James Crow car” back home.)
Waters directly prefigured the success that black performers like Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, and Lena Horne would begin to have with regularity in the postwar era. Like Eckstine and Cole, Waters at the height of her career was largely recording songs by white authors accompanied by white studio orchestras. Still, no one could fail to recognize that she had reached a musical as well as professional peak. She recorded all the significant numbers from her revues and a great many other marvelous songs as well, being almost as responsible as Louis Armstrong for making an instant jazz-pop standard out of “When Your Lover Has Gone,” and bringing her magical touch to “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” “I Got Rhythm,” “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me” (this must be where Sinatra first heard it—forget Maurice Chevalier), and dozens of others. There are classic sessions from the early thirties with the Dorsey Brothers and Benny Goodman’s first orchestra, and then in 1938–39 she made an amazing series of sides for the Bluebird label, using her husband, trumpeter Eddie Mallory, as leader of an all-star black orchestra featuring no less than Benny Carter. (My favorite of the latter batch is Hoagy Carmichael’s catchy—and nourishing—“Bread and Gravy.”)
All in all, Waters was the most popular African American female recording artist of the thirties, one of the few singers to keep going without a letup from the blues craze of the early twenties right into the swing era. Joel Whitburn, in Pop Memories, tells us that “Stormy Weather” and “Am I Blue” were both number-one hits for Waters (and “Dinah” made it to number 2), and while those songs, like everything else in the book (at least with regards to pre-1940 recordings), should be taken with a grain of salt, no one would argue that Waters was extremely popular in live appearances, radio, and recordings.
She may well have hit the high point in her career when she was given the lead in one of the first intelligent book shows written for an all-black cast, the 1940 Cabin in the Sky, in which black performers were, for the first time, allowed to do something other than minstrel-show-style antics. It was another hit, fortunately filmed by MGM, thereby providing us with an invaluable cinematic record of one of the most important of all American artists at her absolute pinnacle. Waters had been filmed before, but this was the first time an African American actor was allowed to be completely human, not just singing and praying, but shown as a three-dimensional (at least as much as anything was in Hollywood musicals) personage.
The audio portion of Cabin is itself no less invaluable; original Broadway cast albums were relatively rare then, and even though Waters recorded four Cabin songs for Liberty Music Shop with a small orchestra in 1940, those tracks pale beside her vocals of the same songs with the lavish MGM studio orchestra. Metro also improved upon Broadway by bringing in Harold Arlen to supply several new songs to supplement Vernon Duke’s already excellent Broadway score, most notably one of Waters’s biggest moments, “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe.” Duke’s “Takin’ a Chance on Love” is another Waters masterwork. Starting with an intro of single string guitar and whistling (from leading man Eddie “Rochester” Anderson), Waters shows how “special effects”—sighs, whispers, purrs like a muted trumpeter, and mild scatting—can enhance a lyric rather than detract from it. Cabin is one of the most remarkable documents of a classic performance by a major Broadway leading lady—there is no comparable movie of Mary Martin, Barbara Cook, or even Ethel Merman (except Call Me Madam). Waters is positively radiant in every shot of Cabin; even the luminous Lena Horne seems like a mere supporting player in her presence.
Cabin in the Sky was indeed Waters’s pinnacle. Unlike most other black headliners, she at least got one starring vehicle. Around this time in the early forties, there were other, less substantial gigs in Hollywood. Like every other female black actress or singer of the period (except Horne, who flatly refused to) Waters was impelled to play a maid at one point (in Cairo with Jeanette MacDonald), but at least she got to sing the fine Harold Arlen song “Buds Won’t Bud.” Then there was one movie in which she sang without acting, Stage Door Canteen, in which she sang “Quicksand” accompanied by Count Basie’s orchestra, and another movie in which she acted without singing, Tales of Manhattan. But by the end of the war years, her career seemed to have crested—all of a sudden no Broadway or Hollywood opportunities were forthcoming.
She describes the long, lean years quite movingly in His Eye Is on the Sparrow, published in 1951. The down period went on for too long, but happily ended when she reemerged as a dramatic actress, first in the nonmusical film Pinky (1949), then in the Broadway drama The Member of the Wedding (1950), starring Julie Harris, and later in the film of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1959). She appeared frequently on TV, including a season of the sitcom Beulah in the role originated by Hattie McDaniel on radio, and often on Billy Graham’s Christian crusades. She even wrote a second autobiography, To Me It’s Wonderful, in 1972. By the time she died, on September 1, 1977, it might even be argued that it was forgotten by the public that she had even been a singer. Forgotten by everyone, that is, except by anyone who ever sang the blues or a popular song.
It seems to me that rather too much is made of the simple fact that Margaret Whiting is, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “to the manner born.” W. C. Handy used this expression to somewhat diplomatically state that only black people were capable of singing the blues; the implication would seem to be that because Whiting’s father, Richard Whiting, was a leading songwriter, that Whiting herself was genetically predisposed to make great music. (Her mother’s sister, too, was a well-known singer: Margaret Young, one of the better female pop singers of the twenties.) I would be more inclined to think that Margaret Whiting’s parental bloodline contributed to her talent if the daughters of other songwriters were equally talented. As it happens, a number of the female offspring of major songwriters are acquaintances of mine, among them Linda Emmett Berlin (daughter of Irving), Rory Burke (daughter of Johnny), Mary Rodgers Guettel (daughter of Richard Rodgers), Ellen Donaldson (daughter of Walter); in this random sample, only Margaret Whiting became a star singer and only Ms. Guettel had a career as a composer.
Whiting was one of six white female pop singers whose stardom was cemented during the war years and whose work is still listened to today; the others were Dinah Shore, Kay Starr, Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford, and Doris Day. (It’s indicative of the talent-spotting abilities of Johnny Mercer that four of the six, including Whiting, were essentially launched by Capitol Records.) Kay Starr’s singing was drenched with Western jazz and blues, Peggy Lee’s was no less jazzy or bluesy but with Scandinavian restraint, Doris Day’s was pure sunshine, and Jo Stafford’s favored reserved optimism with a touch of melancholy.
With her bright, clear contralto and flawless intonation, Whiting was a bit of all of the above. She was something of a swinger like Starr and Lee and also a storyteller like Stafford and Day. Excellent as she is, though, Whiting is the least distinctive of the major vocalists in this group—It’s hard to identify her on the radio as quickly as you can Starr or Lee. She’s also the least idiosyncratic, which can be a good thing.
Margaret Whiting’s father, Richard A. Whiting, was born in 1891 in Peoria, Illinois. Unlike most major songwriters of the golden age of Tin Pan Alley (with the exception, as we shall see, of his future partner Gus Kahn), Whiting spent almost none of his career in the heartland of pop music, which, then as now, meant New York, New York. At the dawn of Whiting’s career, several early efforts reached Jerome H. Remick, a publishing firm located in Detroit. The company not only agreed to publish the songs, they gave Whiting a job there in Motor Town. Before long, he was running the whole office. In those early days, his most frequent partner was Raymond Egan, a bank teller turned lyricist. The two of them had, among many other songs, substantial hits with the classic “Till We Meet Again,” one of the best-remembered tunes of World War I, and “Japanese Sandman,” which, thanks to Paul Whiteman’s multimillion-selling disc, helped launch the dancing twenties.
It wasn’t that Whiting didn’t want to be recognized on Broadway; still based in Detroit, he submitted songs to different producers. Some made it into various shows, but none of these was even remotely a hit. Still, by the early twenties, he was regarded as a major songwriter and a local hero in Michigan. Around this time, he received a visit from two sisters from California, Margaret (1900–1969), a rising singer, and Eleanor Young (originally Youngblood), who was serving as her sister’s agent. They came to Whiting for advice, and he quickly developed a crush on Margaret.
Shortly thereafter, the two Young sisters moved to New York, where Margaret Young did indeed become a headliner, a star of vaudeville and Brunswick Records. Heard today, her work holds up remarkably well, especially the many sides she cut in the early twenties with pioneering sax virtuoso Bennie Krueger. She was the kind of exuberant, jazz-and-blues-inspired vaudevillian who performed the same kind of semihot, seminovelty material as the more famous Marion Harris: “Louisville Lou,” “Lovin’ Sam, the Sheik of Alabam,” and “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” Like Harris, she was an acoustic age performer whose singing sounds considerably less dated than many of the early electric age singers. However, perhaps because her extroverted style was so rooted in the conventions of the early twenties, Brunswick didn’t keep recording her beyond 1925. (She returned to the studio briefly in 1949, for Capitol, undoubtedly through the intervention of her niece, and also sang supporting roles on a few studio cast albums for budget labels.)
Margaret Young also recorded one of Richard Whiting’s big hits of the era, the 1924 “Ukulele Lady.” By that time, they were in-laws. After Margaret married a dancer she had met in New York, Eleanor returned to Detroit and married Richard. Their first of two daughters, Margaret Eleanor—named after her aunt—was born on July 22, 1924, in Detroit. (This is a date that’s generally agreed upon, although various other dates have been offered over the years, some by Whiting herself.) She spent her childhood in Detroit, where she was raised completely immersed in music and songs. In the mid- to late twenties, Richard Whiting’s career went from strength to strength, and he supplied the nation with a fair share of the hit songs that made the twenties roar: “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “Sleepy Time Gal,” “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze,” and “Honey,” to name a few.
Hollywood, then making the transition to talking pictures, took note. Paramount invited him to write the score for Maurice Chevalier’s debut, Innocents of Paris (for which he wrote the standard “Louise”). In a story that still makes Maggie cry, before he left Detroit for this trial job at Paramount, he pinned a love note to his wife’s pillow, and Eleanor took the initiative of submitting it to his publisher, where it was set to music by Neil Moret (of “Chloe” fame). It became possibly Whiting’s most successful copyright, “She’s Funny That Way,” and his only notable effort as a lyricist.
Whiting made good in Hollywood, where, with lyricist Leo Robin, he wrote primarily for Paramount, most famously for stars Maurice Chevalier and Bing Crosby. He also enjoyed a brief sojourn at Twentieth Century Fox, where he wrote Shirley Temple’s most famous song, “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” and also took a breather to work on several Broadway shows, most notably Take a Chance. (Apparently, at least a few customers did—it was one of the bigger hits of the Depression.) For the last few years of his life, Whiting composed songs for Warner Bros., where he worked principally with the young Johnny Mercer (who was originally impressed by Whiting’s golfing skills) for singer Dick Powell and choreographer-auteur Busby Berkeley.
It was in Hollywood that young Maggie got to meet the major music makers of the great years of songwriting, including George Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, and Jerome Kern, who would all be gone by the postwar era. Even granted that no other songwriter’s daughter grew up to become a pop diva, it’s a sure bet that long before Maggie was thirteen—the year her father died—she knew a good song when she heard one. Exactly what killed Richard Whiting on February 10, 1938, is still unclear; what’s usually suggested is that, although a fun-loving, family guy, he was also incredibly high-strung and nervous, and suffered from acute high blood pressure. Undoubtedly, the stress of working in the Hollywood studio system was an important factor; he was also hit hard by the death of his friend George Gershwin a few months earlier.
Following Whiting’s untimely death, his last major partner, Johnny Mercer, took young Maggie under his wing, both as a father figure and as a musical mentor. Sixty years later, she recollected that the most important piece of advice he gave her regarding her singing consisted of only two words. Apparently, as a young teenager she still sounded too immature for Mercer’s tastes, and his pronouncement was that she should “Grow up.”
Fast forward to just four years later, to 1942, when Mercer decided to form his own record company. At that stage in the development of pop music, roles were strictly regimented: Composers didn’t sing professionally, few vocalists could actually write or even read music, and creative types almost never got involved on the business side. Yet Mercer would quickly prove himself one of the most astute music industry men of all time, with a keen knack for picking hit songs and launching or furthering the careers of major singers.
Capitol Records was launched in the months immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was almost put out of business by the 1942–44 AFM ban. Margaret Whiting recalls that during the window of those first few months, she was an extremely nervous seventeen-year-old waiting for her chance to make a record—like Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street, setting foot onstage as a youngster and coming back a star. As she tells the story today, she had no idea what song Mercer would assign to her, and was completely floored when he brought out “My Ideal,” a then forgotten song written by her father for Chevalier in the 1931 Playboy of Paris. She was even more surprised when the disc became a hit—number 12 on the Billboard charts.
Whiting had never worked on the road with any of the major big bands, but Mercer teamed her with two important orchestras for recording purposes. First she cut “That Old Black Magic” and “Silver Wings in the Moonlight” (a number 19 hit) with pianist Freddie Slack’s band. Then, more successfully, Mercer backed her with a band identified as “Billy Butterfield’s Orchestra,” but which was actually Les Brown and His Band of Renown, recording under the pseudonym of the band’s star trumpeter. With the Brown-Butterfield group, Whiting recorded “My Ideal,” “There Goes That Song Again,” and the song most identified with her, “Moonlight in Vermont.”
Johnny Mercer actively managed Capitol’s A&R department until the second record ban (1948), when the pressures of running the business drove him away, but Whiting remained with the label until the midfifties. During these years, she would land about fifty chart hits—not a bad track record—which makes it all the more mysterious that she’s been pretty much ignored by the commercial music industry ever since. In the absence of a Bear Family box or some other comprehensive package, reissue coverage of Whiting’s top years has been fairly negligible. Capitol has made two packages available, a two-CD set of hits, The Complete Capitol Hits of Margaret Whiting and a single of standards, Great Ladies of Song: Spotlight on Margaret Whiting. Apart from that, there are only a few odds and ends: some additional discs from England, such as My Own True Love (Vocalion), and a British EMI twofer CD containing two 12″ Capitol collections, Love Songs and Margaret Whiting Sings for the Starry Eyed. All in all, it ain’t much to show for a major hit maker.
Whenever you have the word “complete” in an album title, and even more so when you have the word “hits,” you know you’re in for trouble. As we’ve seen before, hit songs are not always the same thing as good songs, even in Whiting’s case, and thus not everything on The Complete Capitol Hits of Margaret Whiting is worthy of being heard in the same package as such classics as “My Ideal” and “Moonlight in Vermont.” In her case, as with a lot of other singers from her generation, it’s a matter of diminishing returns. Nearly all of the forties sides are good, but as you get into the fifties, this is less and less the case.
Fortunately, Whiting’s hits in the Mercer era (1942–48) were all good if not great songs, and as a result, the first disc of Whiting’s Complete Capitol Hits set is not only highly listenable but essential. Her voice flows out sweet and clear on what can really be described as being as good as any of the best music of the immediate postwar era. Working with Mercer as producer, occasional songwriter, and duet partner, her output was skewed toward Broadway and its canon of major composers. Peggy Lee and Kay Starr may have charted with blues, country, and ethnic novelties, but Whiting was the fair-haired girl as far as show and movie tunes were concerned. Her single biggest hit, however, was a rather tepid British import called “A Tree in the Meadow.”
For Whiting, “Guilty” was a blessing: another vintage song of her father’s that charted all over again thanks to her. Richard Whiting wrote it in 1931, with Harry Akst and Gus Kahn, and it was popular enough and widely recorded at the time. Fifteen years later, it was apparently Tony Martin (who was old enough to remember 1931) who first had the idea of reviving “Guilty.” Both Martin (on Mercury) and Whiting’s friend Mel Tormé (on Musicraft) recorded it before she did, but it was her Capitol single that was the big hit. The song was relentlessly snappy and peppy in 1931, a true period foxtrot, but Whiting’s treatment is slow (though still in a very danceable tempo). “Guilty” displays the trademark sincerity of both Whitings at their most moving; she sings it without affectation of any kind, but with complete commitment to the material, totally caught up in the happy-sad nature of Gus Kahn’s lyric.
Whiting also helped make Mercer and Arlen’s “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “Black Magic” into hits and standards, and she gave “Uncle Jerry” (Kern) his last hurrah with “All Through the Day” and “In Love in Vain.” Both were from Centennial Summer, and were so new that Whiting sings the latter lyric as “who wants to be in love alone.” She also put over Burke and Van Heusen’s “But Beautiful” (Road to Rio), Lane and Harburg’s “Old Devil Moon” (Finian’s Rainbow), Martin, Blane, and Edens’s “Pass That Peace Pipe” (Good News), and Harold Rome’s “Along with Me” (Call Me Mister).
However, the songwriter she best served was Richard Rodgers; apparently, she changed the very shape of “It Might as Well Be Spring.” According to Margaret, the composer had envisioned this tune as a jaunty little schottische, a dance form much used by Bing Crosby in the late thirties, but when Whiting and arranger Paul Weston slowed it down to ballad tempo, Rodgers followed suit—as soon as his blood stopped boiling. In 1949, she recorded no fewer than three R&H classics from South Pacific: “Younger Than Springtime,” “(I’m in Love with) A Wonderful Guy” (which she put on the pop charts), and “A Cockeyed Optimist”; Hammerstein’s lyrics might have proclaimed that these songs were “a cliché coming true” but Whiting’s straightforward, meaningful interpretations emphasize Hammerstein’s truths rather than his clichés.
After Mercer left the A&R department, however, things went downhill fast. Her best record of 1949, paradoxically, is her major duet with Johnny himself, on Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Whiting has related that she heard Loesser and his wife, Lynn, sing it at a Hollywood party sometime around 1947 or 1948 and thought right away that it would make a great duet for her and Johnny; Loesser, however, was cagey, saying that he couldn’t give it to them just yet as MGM had bought the rights for an Esther Williams epic. The song won an Oscar despite Ms. Williams, who sang it fully clothed and on dry land. However, while Whiting and Mercer waited for permission, Columbia Records got their version, with Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark, out first. (That’s the way Maggie remembers it; according to Whitburn, the Whiting-Mercer version made it to number 4 on the charts while the Shore-Clark rendition also peaked at number 4.)
Whiting continued to be given good songs at least until the late forties, not all of which came from Broadway or Hollywood, like the zingy and catchy “Great Guns” (1949) and “Dime a Dozen” (both on the My Own True Love collection), which utilizes virtually the same arrangement and chord changes as Mel Tormé’s “Careless Hands,” right down to the handclaps, a quasi-country harbinger of things to come. By the early fifties, Whiting’s Capitol hits grew increasingly unlistenable to, the worst offenders being a seemingly endless series of horrible hoe-downs with a half-baked hillbilly named Jimmy Wakely. The mystery is not what genius came up with this idea to begin with, but rather how on earth these dreadful sides could have been such blockbuster hits. Heard today, they are Exhibit A for the argument that the hits of yore are not necessarily music worth listening to after the fact. The series includes “Slippin’ Around,” a good country song though hardly suited to Whiting, the considerably worse “I’ll Never Slip Around Again” (a sequel to a song that Whiting shouldn’t have recorded to begin with), “The Gods Were Angry with Me,” and “Let’s Go to Church (Next Sunday Morning).” Few of Whiting’s solos were any better, the dreadful “Good Morning, Mister Echo” is as bad as anything that Doris Day was singing for Mitch Miller at Columbia, worse even than “Rickety Rackety Rendezvous” and “Mr. Tap Toe,” which at least are catchy and danceable.
One wonders how many terrific songs lie buried in the vaults while these appalling hits are ready for purchase on the Internet. One of the greatest mysteries is why her 1947 Margaret Whiting Sings Rodgers and Hart has never been available since the 10″ LP era. As Whiting has said, this was Mercer’s idea, and at the time it was radical. Previous to this project, only Lee Wiley had recorded a songbook album, and her four 1939–42 songbooks were hardly mass-market (they were sold only in specialty shops, mostly in Manhattan). Whiting was not only the first mainstream star to record a songbook package, Rodgers and Hart specifically (this was a decade before Ella Fitzgerald), but she also seems to have been the first star singer ever to record “My Funny Valentine.” By the time she left Capitol, “Valentine” had assumed its place as one of the most recorded standards of all time.
“Valentine” is not on the Spotlight compilation, but everything that is on there is good. One of the better entries in that long—and not always imaginatively programmed—series, the Whiting collection starts with “Day In—Day Out,” one of the most effective ballad treatments of that Mercer text from the days before Sinatra and later Cole taught it to swing. Whiting also shines on a previously unreleased master of Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,” which retains the quasi-Latin underpinning heard on many of the original 1934 dance band versions. There’s also a reading of “I Could Write a Book,” from a 1952 session with her then husband, pianist and conductor Lou Busch (father of her daughter, Debbie). Other highlights of the Spotlight collection include a heartfelt rendition of her father’s classic “She’s Funny That Way,” a swinging “Gypsy in My Soul” (a song salvaged from a University of Pennsylvania Mask and Wig Club production), and a touching “I’ve Never Been in Love Before.”
The bulk of her better songs from the late forties and early fifties were arranged and conducted by Frank DeVol, who was working occasionally with Peggy Lee during this period (and once with Nat Cole, on “Nature Boy”), but was reserving most of his dance card for Whiting. DeVol also conducts on the generally excellent full-length album Songs for the Starry Eyed, a first-rate set of ballads, including more worthy obscurities like “Love Can Happen Anytime” (by Josef Myrow) and “Young Man’s Fancy” (from John Murray Anderson’s Almanac). There’s also a marvelously introspective, ruminative “Let’s Fall in Love,” complete with verse.
But key exceptions aside, Whiting never really made the transition from a singles artist to an album artist. Ultimately there was just too much of a sameness to her delivery: Everything sounded like everything else, and you didn’t want to hear a whole album’s worth. As Alan Livingston, then the president of Capitol Records, recalled: “It was painful for us, because she was one of the original Capitol artists, successful Capitol artists, and when rock came in, they didn’t sell. Stan Kenton stopped selling. Peggy Lee stopped selling to an extent. Margaret Whiting wasn’t selling. Her contract came up, and out of loyalty to her I said I would re-sign her. She sent in a lawyer to meet with me who made ridiculous demands, and I said, ‘I’m not going to meet them. I can’t. I will keep Margaret and make records with her, but not on that basis.’ And he left. And poor Margaret, that was the end of her—on records, at least.”
The end of her relationship with Capitol also marked the end of her years as a hit maker, but not quite of her career on records. She began recording for Dot, for whom she made the excellent Goin’ Places in state-of-the-art 1958 stereo. Although most of her best-known hits were ballads, this album is primarily bouncers in the Sinatra-Riddle–style heartbeat tempo, starting with a Whiting favorite, the swinging “Gypsy in My Soul”; she also swings two Johnny Mercer classics usually done in slow blues or ballad tempo, “Hit the Road to Dreamland” and an especially Frankish “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” with muted trumpet obbligatos. Other delights included “Song of the Wanderer” by her father’s onetime partner Neil Moret, and the early R&B classic “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town.” Goin’ Places again saw the light of day on a later LP (from the British Jasmine label), but it would be especially welcome on CD.
After Dot, Whiting moved over to Verve, recently annexed by MGM Records, where she made two albums, the largely disappointing Broadway Right Now with old friend Mel Tormé and the indisputably perfect Margaret Whiting Sings the Jerome Kern Songbook. Both were arranged and conducted by Russ Garcia, but the Tormé album has only a few moments of charm (among them Whiting’s solo “Make Someone Happy” and the medley of two songs from Wildcat, “Far Away from Home” and “Angelina”); the Jerome Kern album is absolutely flawless.
Still only in her mid-thirties, by now Whiting had perfected her style: Where fellow Capitolians Lee and Starr were fine-tuning an approach that combined elements of jazz and pop, Whiting situated herself precisely between mainstream pop and Broadwaystyle emoting, juxtaposing the virtues of, say, a Barbara Cook with those of, say, a Jo Stafford. The proof is evident throughout the Kern Songbook. Whiting was virtually the only (comparatively) young major singer in the LP age who had actually known the Old Man personally. She had already sung more of her “Uncle” Jerry’s music than most of her contemporaries, including three Kern classics on Songs for the Starry-Eyed, among them a wonderful “I’ve Told Every Little Star.” Her 1960 album is easily the finest collection of Kern’s music ever recorded by a singer, its only possible rival being the Ella Fitzgerald–Nelson Riddle album of a few years later.
Whiting is superb on Kern classics like “I Won’t Dance” as well as worthy obscurities like “You Couldn’t Be Cuter” (one of the only performances of this 1938 charmer, from Joy of Living, in the modern LP era). She’s up to the task of making his heavier and more melodramatic songs, like “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” seem believable, but she also makes light bouncers such as “Why Do I Love You” something more than frivolous. She’s appropriately serious but not overly heavy on “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” the song that virtually defined the torch song era, and she meaningfully reanimates the long dormant “D’Ye Love Me” (from the 1925 Sunny) along with other worthy antiques, such as “Poor Pierrot” from The Cat and the Fiddle. If you want to hear the best work of Margaret Whiting’s career, you needn’t go all the way back to her mid-forties hits, wonderful as some of them are. You need only go to this classic album. (Margaret Whiting Sings the Jerome Kern Songbook was at last reissued on CD in 2002; let’s hope it’s still findable when you read this.)
It’s indeed unfortunate that the 1960 Jerome Kern Songbook is Whiting’s last classic album. But if she was going to go out on a high note, she couldn’t have picked a higher one. She did continue to record into the sixties, but never again scaled the heights. After Dot and Verve, there were three albums for London, one of which included a hit that penetrated the lower (or is it higher) reaches of what was then being called the “adult contemporary” charts, a single with the uncomely title of “The Wheel of Hurt.” In her cabaret phase, Whiting has recorded more recently for Audiophile and DRG, the latter a surprisingly good package for a seventy-year-old diva that guest-stars Gerry Mulligan, who obviously knows a good singer when he hears one.
Since the seventies, Whiting had enjoyed the company of Jack Wrangler, a former porn star who had since reinvented himself as a cabaret and musical theater impresario. I don’t know why that should raise any eyebrows: Of Whiting’s contemporaries, only Dinah Shore had the good luck to consort with major leading men of two generations, George Montgomery and Burt Reynolds. Otherwise, Peggy Lee was married to a drunk and Doris Day to a psychopath and then a con artist, while Kay Starr seemed determined to marry everybody who wasn’t already married to Dinah Washington. So why worry if Mag wanted to marry a porn star? As far as I could see, they were happy together for thirty years, so more power to them.
After relocating to New York, Whiting has come to be regarded as a goddess of the New York cabaret scene, a diva who’s always surrounded by other divas, except that there’s nothing haughty or unapproachable about Maggie, in either her offstage presence or her singing. She worked around the country and the city frequently in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and was a longtime member of the 4 Girls 4 troupe, the original edition of which combined her with Rosemary Clooney, Helen O’Connell, and Rose Marie. Whiting continued to perform until well into the twenty-first century, and she remained a vital presence in New York cabaret rooms even after she stopped performing. She ostensibly went to visit old friends and check out newcomers, but in the process she became the inspiration for hundreds of singers at all ages and career levels. After the death of her husband, Jack, in 2009, Margaret left her West Fifty-eighth Street apartment (she lived around the corner from Tony Bennett) to move into an assisted care facility in New Jersey. The fall and winter of 2009 into 2010 was the first season I could remember in which I didn’t run into her at at least one show or another. Over a career that lasted more than sixty years, Margaret Whiting played a considerable role in making the Great American Songbook great.
Ecclesiastes 9:11 tells us that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that “time and chance happeneth to them all.” Time and chance have happeneth to a great many artists since I’ve been listening to music. I can’t even remember the names of most of the pop groups my fellow students were abusing their eardrums with back in the days when I wore glasses and had long hair (I miss the second but not the first), but at the same time, tastes have changed among those of us who listen to the major singers and songs of the mid-twentieth century as well. Yes, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Frank Sinatra dominated our tastes then, even as they do now, but other reputations have risen and fallen. For one, Mildred Bailey’s: Most of her music was completely unavailable—out of print and out of mind—for the entire LP era. By the nineties, Bailey existed only in the memories of artists who grew up hearing her; finally, in 1999, with the release of ten CDs of her nearly complete recordings by Mosaic Records, we can all hear exactly why Bailey deserves her place in the pantheon.
Thanks to that reissue, Bailey’s reputation has risen, yet I can’t help wondering if that of Lee Wiley hasn’t fallen a little, if only because she recorded so little for an artist of her stature. Lee Wiley lived considerably longer than her friend Bailey, yet her career in retrospect seems considerably smaller. Virtually everything she ever sang has been available one way or another, and it amounts to far less than we would like, in terms of quantity though not of quality. Yet she was a distinctive stylist, with a warm, smoky sound, and an obvious influence on vocalists of the swing era and the postwar era, too, from Billie Holiday, Kay Starr, and Peggy Lee on. More than Bailey, Wiley had an indisputably jazzy timbre—it wasn’t just her phrasing and interpretation, it was the very sound of her voice itself. This was what a jazz singer sounded like, a bluesy, Midwestern drawl that was almost a feminine counterpart to Jack Teagarden. Hers is the sound of scotch and cigarettes, not to mention broken hearts.
It’s clear that both geographic and temporal circumstances can affect an artist’s reputation. After something of a career as a pop star, Wiley reinvented herself in the forties as roughly the only chick singer in the Eddie Condon Mob, which led to a later career very different from that of other vocalists. She wasn’t jazzy in the scatting-and-improvising sense of an Ella Fitzgerald, yet her voice on its own sounded more like a jazz instrument than Fitzgerald’s or anyone else’s. Early on, fans of traditional and Chicagostyle jazz recognized that she was something special. Geography is also a consideration: Wiley, like Kay Starr after her, was from Oklahoma, which was still a territory when Wiley was born. Yet it wasn’t her Okie associations that marked her music, or even her alleged Native American bloodline (something also said of Starr and Bailey); Wiley was an indelible part of the jazz scene in New York and Boston in the forties and fifties. In those two towns there was almost always an audience for her singing. Boston was the center of master impresario George Wein’s operations, and he became her biggest booster. It was no coincidence that both Teddi King and Barbara Lea, the two younger artists who rate as her finest disciples, also came from the Boston area.
Unfortunately, time and chance certainly did happeneth to Lee Wiley. One can only wish that she had been as prolific and consistent as Bailey or Holiday or Connee Boswell; it would be great, for instance, to have a ten-CD box of recordings of the prewar period. Even in the twenty-first century, the music that Wiley did leave us sounds as good as ever. She still has that cool, breathy sound, that knack for a well-placed passionate sigh at the end of lines (particularly on her earlier sides), that lightly swinging approach. Thirty-five years after her demise, her recordings continue to be well served by her careerlong penchant for wanting to work with the best musicians (even if they didn’t always enjoy working with her). Her finest albums—Night in Manhattan, East of the Sun, A Touch of the Blues—are still among the most satisfying efforts ever by a female singer.
Wiley herself always said that she was born on October 9, 1915, which would make her a mere wisp of a girl, aged fifteen, when she made her recording debut as a vocalist with Leo Reisman’s orchestra in June 1931. Few people believe that date, including her younger brother, Ted, who told me that it had to be at least four or five years earlier. More recently, researcher Ted Ono discovered that the date inscribed on her tombstone is 1908. In a seventies interview with Richard Lamparski, Wiley speaks vividly about growing up in the twenties in Oklahoma, about dreaming of being a famous singer, and discovering jazz and blues via “race” records—particularly those of Ethel Waters—which were sold only in a certain part of town. She also said that the influence of Mildred Bailey inspired her to make singing a career, but this seems like an attempt to convince the interviewer that she was younger than she actually was, since Bailey wouldn’t have been widely heard on the radio until Wiley was an adult herself. Both of these ladies played fast and loose with their ages; it may not be a coincidence that Bailey always claimed to have been born in 1908, which apparently is Wiley’s actual birth year.
From singing on a local radio station, Wiley made her way to St. Louis and then New York. There she attracted the ear of Leo Reisman, one of the most prominent bandleaders of the thirties, and made her first recordings as Reisman’s vocalist in 1931. Recently, a company called Devil’s Music (available from Baldwin Street Music) has begun a CD series covering Wiley’s early recordings in what they call the Completists’ Ultimate Collection. So far, the series has reached four volumes, and does a remarkable job of collecting all the commercial studio material (there isn’t much), every master recording, every known alternate take, and every aircheck extant.
It’s an interesting, wildly varied mix of material. In these years, Wiley was almost a serious contender in the mainstream pop stakes, along with Bailey, Kate Smith, and Connee Boswell, as one of the most recognizable female voices on the radio. She broadcast and recorded with big bands ranging from the hot and jazzy, like the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra and the Casa Loma, to those oriented toward concert and society listeners—Reisman, Paul Whiteman, Johnny Green, and Rudy Vallee. A considerable amount of her recording activity centers around Victor Young: She sang with his band on his records (most notably “You’re an Old Smoothie”); he accompanied her with his studio orchestra on her records (there are superb sides from 1934 and 1937); they wrote songs together, most famously “Got the South in My Soul” and “Anytime, Any Day, Anywhere.” Apparently, Young and Wiley were engaged in other activities together that were not entirely of a musical nature.
Wiley was terrific from the very beginning. Earlier, in the twenties, female pop singers were either flappers or girly, occasionally high-pitched squirrely types (be they as musicianly as Annette Hanshaw or as annoying as Helen Kane, or a little bit of both, like Ruth Etting), all very popular in the early years of electrical recording. By the onslaught of the Depression, the focus had shifted to what they then called torch singers, who took Broadway’s Helen Morgan as their model. These were sultry, world-weary types, best exemplified by Claudette Colbert in the 1933 movie Torch Singer, in which she plays a young unwed mother who becomes the toast of Manhattan as a nightclub headliner. (“The worst woman in New York … sang the best love songs! Lips that had kissed more men than she could remember … crooned lullabies no one could forget!”) The casting was ideal, except that it never seemed to occur to Paramount Pictures that Colbert couldn’t sing a note. (They should have brought in Wiley to overdub for her; even Rita Hayworth or Vera Ellen would have sounded better.) But such was the norm with torch singers: Libby Holman, the real-life wounded woman who popularized the genre (Broadway headliner marries tobacco heir, accused of murder, vindicated) and introduced the ultimate torch song, “Body and Soul,” also didn’t have much to offer musically.
Wiley’s contribution to popular music directly paralleled that of her friend and supporter Bing Crosby. If you could reduce Crosby’s innovations to a single sentence, it would be that he combined the intimacy now being made possible with electrical recording with the energy and rhythm of jazz, as perfected by friends Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke—not to mention the high drama of childhood inspiration Al Jolson. Likewise, Wiley took the established genre of torch singing and infused it with a true feeling for jazz and the blues, which she learned from Ethel Waters and classic blues singers like Bessie Smith. Crosby was not the very first crooner, but he was the first singer of mainstream popular songs with genuine musicianship and an understanding of jazz and swing. Likewise, Wiley may have been the first torch singer who knew her way around jazz and the blues, expressing a genuinely erotic sultriness and sensuality that’s nowhere to be found in most white female singers of the twenties.
It’s not surprising that the thirties would be Wiley’s biggest decade in terms of mainstream acceptance: She was essentially the only one combining jazz and torch at that time. But by the end of the decade, all kinds of singers were doing it, and Wiley had lost her uniqueness; what’s more, contemporaries like Connee Boswell and Mildred Bailey were better equipped to keep up with the swing era. Bailey sang more than convincingly with Benny Goodman in 1939 and Boswell recorded brilliantly with Bob Crosby, Woody Herman, and other top leaders, but it’s impossible to imagine Wiley with any kind of a big swing band. “She could swing, every note she swung,” as George Wein put it, “but she swung in a very sophisticated and very genteel way.”
In 1940, however, the public wanted a heavy-duty, flat-out, no-holds-barred swinging singer like Ella Fitzgerald, and not the genteel and sophisticated swing that Wiley offered. Both Maxine Sullivan and Mildred Bailey have been described as genteel and sophisticated, yet they were both much stronger rhythmically than Wiley. Wiley was possibly too subtle for the war years, an era when brassy stars like Betty Hutton and the Andrews Sisters dominated; even before the war, Wiley’s moment in the sun had passed.
That is, as far as the mainstream was concerned. Yet even if she would never be on the cover of a national magazine again, there were two smaller support groups who would keep her working for as long as she could keep her act together. The first was the cabaret and musical theater crowd, who bought the albums she recorded of the songbooks of the great Broadway composers, and the second, as already mentioned, was the group of Chicago- and New Orleans–oriented traditional jazz and swing players who congregated in New York and Boston around Eddie Condon.
Both groups were satisfied by a series of four remarkable songbook albums cut between 1939 and 1942, in which she was accompanied principally by Condonites (as well as major guest stars, like Bunny Berigan and Fats Waller). These were all eight-song collections of the music of, respectively, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter (done mostly with members of Tommy Dorsey’s band), and Harold Arlen. Of the composers represented, only George Gershwin was no longer living at the time; this is surely the only Rodgers and Hart album released while Lorenz Hart was still around to enjoy it.
In a sense, these four 78 rpm album collections laid the foundation for the groundbreaking LPs of both Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Yet while Sinatra and Fitzgerald were aiming at the American mainstream, Wiley was reduced to reaching for the margins: All four of her songbook packages were produced and sold by midtown Manhattan music shops like Liberty and Schirmer and so were largely available only to their theater-going cognoscenti clientele.
By 1943, Wiley was firmly a part of the Condon circle. He accompanied her on the Arlen album and officially labeled her “the greatest of all jazz singers.” She was a regular guest vocalist on the guitarist-raconteur-producer’s World War II–era Town Hall concerts (most of which have been issued on the Audiophile label, the same label that has made the four songbook albums available), and it was clear that she could always count on Condon and the traditional jazz circuit for work.
Wiley escaped from cult status only twice: In 1950 and 1951, when she made three 10″ LPs for Mitch Miller and Columbia Records, and then in 1956 and 1957 when she made two 12″ LPs for RCA. By then, nobody was harboring any illusions about Wiley breaking through to the pop audience, or even to the bigger jazz audience that was supporting many singers. As pianist Stan Freeman told me, “I remember Mitch saying that he felt that Lee’s records weren’t going to be big sellers, but that he owed it to the public to record her, because she was so good.”
Despite the smoky, burnished quality of her voice, it would be wrong to characterize her exclusively as a jazz singer. “I never thought of her as a jazz singer, she was a great singer,” said Mitch Miller, by which he meant she was an essential artist with a profound gift for interpreting a lyric, and other skills, beyond rhythm and swing and the blues, that were not necessarily the exclusive province of jazz. Although there were some jazz elements to her work, she didn’t belong in the same class with such pure, 100 percent jazzers as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
Conversely, in the forties, when you said “cabaret singer,” chances are you meant someone very fancy and formal, with a touch of Old Europe, like the Incomparable Hildegarde. Mabel Mercer, with her rolled Rs and very proper diction, plus her Margaret Dumont–like deportment, was the ideal cabaret singer. Still, within a few years the archetypal image of the cabaret singer became someone more like Wiley than Mercer, a lot jazzier and looser and bluesier. In those days, there was more of a gulf between Birdland and the Blue Angel, but since Wiley’s day, there has evolved a hybrid heritage, part traditional cabaret and part traditional jazz. Lee Wiley seems to be its principal foremother, along with her most important progeny, King and Lea—and their own latter-day stylistic descendants like Daryl Sherman. By the millennium, the principal difference between a jazz singer and a cabaret singer was that the latter talked considerably more and always thanked her lights-and-sound guy.
If Wiley’s music was a potpourri, her personal life was also a mixed bag, filled with apparent contradictions. On one hand, she did have a few close friends, like pianist Joe Bushkin and his wife, Fran, who played on many of her most famous recordings, including Night in Manhattan. To the end of Joe’s life, he defended her both professionally and musically. Other musicians got along with her famously. But not all. Wiley had a longtime drinking problem that worsened with age, and, to play armchair psychologist (you don’t have to be Freud to dope this one out), it was exacerbated by an acute insecurity. “The funny thing about Lee,” Bushkin said to me, “was that she was perfectly relaxed and comfortable in the studio when the red light went on, but she was a nervous wreck whenever she appeared at the Pierre or different supper clubs. [Singing live] somehow or other rattled her, you know? It’s the opposite with most musicians. They’re relaxed when there are people around digging it. But in the studio, Lee was happy as a clam, and she sang so beautifully.” There are also stories of Wiley being verbally abusive to her musicians, particularly when she was under the influence. To the end of his life, the always irascible Ruby Braff (hardly a paragon of upstanding behavior) went ballistic at the very mention of her name.
Alcohol wasn’t the only thing she was addicted to. There is an unending supply of gossip from the musicians of a certain generation concerning Wiley’s no less insatiable appetite for men: gentleman callers, beaux, boyfriends, lovers, whatever. Wiley’s most famous lovers were Victor Young and Bunny Berigan, two married men who were thus unavailable on a permanent basis, but there were liaisons with many famous bandleaders, composers, and other celebrities. Artie Shaw also talked about her with surprising warmth and sentiment. Wiley could have easily been the inspiration for Ira Gershwin’s “Poor Jenny”: Had she ever published her memoirs, wives would have surely shot their husbands in thirty-three states.
Her first marriage was to Jess Stacy, a wonderful pianist associated with both Goodman and Condon, a relationship that ended acrimoniously. The second time around, she married one Nat Tischenkel, who owned a drugstore inside New York’s posh Hotel Astor, and who made it possible for her to work or not work as much as she pleased in her final decades.
When Wiley sang Joe Bushkin’s “Oh! Look at Me Now,” for some unknown reason the original lyricist, Johnny DeVries, wrote a special set of lyrics for her—and how I wish he hadn’t. The new text turns the protagonist from an optimistic lad into a gold digging hussy; the original hero sings of his desire to fall in love, the new heroine sings of her avaricious desire for checks and jewelry. I can only hope in my heart that the real-life Wiley wasn’t anywhere near so mercenary.
As minimal as Wiley’s overall output is, she does get better and better as the decades wear on: Her dance-band-oriented work of the thirties is superseded by her Condon-associated work of the forties (and the very best tracks from that association are, surprisingly, from the live concerts), including her appearances on the Condon Gershwin album for Decca. Then, too, the three major albums of the fifties, Night in Manhattan, West of the Moon, and A Touch of the Blues, are enough to turn anyone into a Lee Wiley convert.
In 1939, Wiley (backed by trumpeter Max Kaminsky) recorded “I’ve Got a Crush on You” in a classic performance on her original Gershwin album, one which, as Ira Gershwin readily acknowledged, completely changed the public perception of the song from a peppy foxtrot to a melancholy love song. In 1947, Sinatra, obviously inspired by Wiley, recorded his own treatment of “Crush.” He slowed it down even further, adding a string quartet, and amplified the trumpet obbligato, now played by the superior Bobby Hackett. Three years after Sinatra, Wiley returned to “Crush” for Night in Manhattan, a performance with string section (and Bobby Hackett again) that seems equally based on her own 1939 performance and on Sinatra’s in 1947. It’s Wiley’s 1950 recording that blows everyone away, even her younger self. If the word “crush” had previously been jazz slang, Wiley did more than anyone to make the word a permanent part of the English language. She invests so much feeling in the word “crush” that she could have inserted any jive phrase in its place and the meaning would still be crystal clear. (She does the same for the phrase “cunning cottage.”) Wiley tells us that the world will pardon her “mush,” but she sings so straightforwardly and movingly that there simply is no mush to pardon.
“Crush” is merely one-eighth of Night in Manhattan, in which the combination of string quartet and trumpet soloist is a direct reference to the earlier “chamber” sessions by Sinatra and Axel Stordahl. “I had done some piano ‘mood music’ for [Columbia],” as Bushkin recalled for me. “They were very pleased with the reaction to my trio and they said, ‘Would you like to do an album?’ I said I wanted to do one with Bobby Hackett. So I wrote some strings behind me and Bobby [to play behind Lee].” Apparently Miller, who ran the entire pop singles division of Columbia, George Avakian, who produced the jazz and pop albums, and Bushkin were all in agreement: The optimal project was a combination of Lee Wiley, Bushkin’s trio, a string quartet, and Bobby Hackett. The four elements get along brilliantly on all eight tracks: Wiley shines in the elegant yet funky surroundings of Bushkin’s keyboard, Hackett’s horn, and the strings.
Wiley was certainly loyal: For this, her first major label project in a dozen years, she turns over fully half of the eight cuts to the love of her life, Victor Young, delivering definitive interpretations of three of his best-known songs, “Street of Dreams,” “Any Time, Any Day, Anywhere” (co-written by Wiley), and “A Ghost of a Chance,” and one of his worst, “A Woman’s Intuition.” Wiley’s own woman’s intuition should have scared her away from this puppy, which bears the cross of a convoluted lyric that one can’t believe is the work of the normally excellent Ned Washington. Apart from “Intuition,” the closest thing to a disappointment is the heinous revised lyric to “Oh! Look at Me Now.” Despite that, this is nonetheless one of the finest albums ever recorded of the Great American Songbook, perhaps the most essential document of the jazz-cabaret style.
Wiley made two other 10″ LPs for Columbia, also conceived and produced by Miller. These are songbooks, first Irving Berlin and then Vincent Youmans, and on both she’s accompanied by the two-piano team of Stan Freeman and Cy Walters. This was a convention of theater music and cabaret at the time—Judy Garland and Mabel Mercer, among others, recorded in the two-piano format. It may well have been Miller’s bid to pitch Wiley at one of her core audiences, the Liberty Music Shop crowd of song connoisseurs. There’s some wonderful singing here, particularly on “Fools Fall in Love,” a first-rate Berlin ballad from Louisiana Purchase done by hardly anyone else (except Teddi King, who learned it from Wiley, and Marlene VerPlanck, who learned it from King).
There’s also some first-class Wiley on her 1954 Rodgers and Hart collection, produced by George Wein, despite some apparent hostility between her and Ruby Braff; “A Ship Without a Sail” is the standout. The mid-fifties also saw one rather disappointing date, apparently produced independently and sold to Coral Records, released as singles, which attempted to repackage her in pop trappings (even though the songs were from the thirties, including “Old Man of the Mountain”) but instead only proved that this particular ship had long since sailed.
After Night in Manhattan, Wiley’s worthiest effort was West of the Moon, another one of those rare jazz (or what have you) vocal albums that’s so amazingly good one can’t imagine changing a note. (It’s hard to believe it took until 2007 for it to come out in a definitive American CD edition, from Mosaic.) Again we have Wiley, a tight rhythm section, and a bed of either soft strings or soft reeds, plus first-rank soloists: clarinetist Peanuts Hucko and trumpeter Billy Butterfield, under the baton of one of the finest of arrangers, Ralph Burns, who had the unique gift of writing charts that were at once sensitive and swinging. Wiley’s voice is absolutely perfect. By 1956–57, the hi-fi recording technology was astute enough to pick up every exquisite nuance of her chops.
The second RCA album, A Touch of the Blues, is a bit louder and brassier—yet no less perfect—with orchestrations that seem more suited to a conventional definition of a jazz singer. A Touch of the Blues has Wiley backed by a studio group led by trumpeter Billy Butterfield with orchestrations by Al Cohn and Bill Finegan. Even though A Touch of the Blues is significantly less subtle, it’s almost as good as West of the Moon.
And that was pretty much it. There’s a rehearsal with Bushkin from 1965 (issued thirty years later on CD), and then in 1971 and 1972, she did a disappointing final album called Back Home Again followed by a disappointing “comeback” performance at Carnegie Hall (all three post-1960 recordings have been issued by Audiophile). Should we be angry that there aren’t more albums up to Night in Manhattan and West of the Moon when Wiley was clearly singing brilliantly in the fifties, or should we be grateful for the albums that did get made?
Wiley died in 1975. As was true of Johnny Hartman, her career was one of fits and starts. It’s amazing that she had the influence she’s had, considering how small her recorded output is and how inconsistent her professional life was.
Ted Wiley recalled an incident that occurred one day when he was visiting his older sister at her suite at the Hotel Astor. There was a knock on the door, and in came Artie Shaw. “He wanted to show Lee some shirts that he’d just bought. After he left, she said to me, ‘You know, he wanted to marry me.’ ” I then asked Ted if Lee had ever regretted any of the decisions she’d made in her life, or cried over the way things had gone. “No, she wasn’t sentimental,” he answered. “When she’d break up with somebody, it didn’t faze her. She put her feelings in her songs. Friends of mine remark about that, that she sings the blues, you know? Maybe she was singing over lost loves, I don’t know, but she never mentioned it. When she sang, you would think she was carrying a torch for the whole world.”