“How would you like to submit to a blindfold test, listen to a typical Fats Waller song, then when the bandage was removed find that seated at the keyboard, instead of the 200 pounds of brown-skinned masculinity you expected, was a light, slim, smiling girl?” Those were the words of Leonard Feather, writing in 1937, describing his first experience hearing Una Mae Carlisle. At that time, Feather and his readers may have been somewhat surprised to make this discovery, but within a few years it would be obvious to everyone that Fats Waller’s most important followers were female. For whatever reason, it’s hard to think of a major male singer-pianist to fill the gap between Waller and Nat Cole.
In the mid- to late thirties, Waller (1904–1943) was the central figure in the jukebox-driven small combo movement, in which dozens of singing musicians made hundreds of records that were distributed to thousands of restaurants, bars, and roadhouses across the country, which collectively raked in millions of nickels. The juke records generally allotted a generous amount of solo space to instrumental soloists, and the central point of each was a vocal chorus by the singing leader, most of whom were heavily influenced by Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, or both.
Except for Waller, hardly any of the juke singer-leaders were composers themselves; a key driving force of the movement was the pressure from publishers to feature new songs from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood. In fact, these discs, in addition to documenting the playing of many key soloists from the swing era, also serve as valuable evidence of the state of the art of American songwriting at its zenith, and that’s even though the songs included a few of the worst as well as many of the best.
Waller was at the center of the juke boom, yet, curiously, there were few directly Wallerian pianistentertainers. There was Putney Dandridge on Vocalion and Bob Howard on Decca; the latter only occasionally played piano on records, although he was sometimes billed as “Fatso Howard.”
But the most substantial of Fats’s followers were a quartet of African American females, one of whom was actually two years older than Waller himself. All four participated in the juke jazz movement, but they also were part of other developments in African American music, including swing, big bands, blues, and, most notably, the evolution of “race” music into rhythm and blues. Like Waller, they all were exceptional pianists, and they sang in a wide range of styles that could be traced back to Waller himself: Cleo Brown and especially Rose Murphy sang in a sweet, high voice that recalled Waller in his rare moments of straightforward ballad tenderness. Julia Lee, by contrast, had more of a guttural, blues-based style that suggests Fats at his downest and dirtiest. Like Waller, they were all consistently irreverent, and as much inclined to kid a love song, using humorous asides, as they were to sing it straight.
There were at least a few notable female pianistsingers in the twenties and early thirties; two prominent (white) women who come to mind are Lee Morse and Ramona Davies, who was billed by her first name only. Ms. Morse recorded around two hundred songs between 1924 and 1932, and her wares are nicely sampled in Take Two’s Lee Morse: A Musical Portrait. Hers was an idiosyncratic style that combined pop with twenties style hot jazz as well as what was then called “hillbilly music”; in fact, her band was billed as “Lee Morse and Her Bluegrass Boys.” Morse’s best music offers evidence that the stylistic boundaries between these various forms, which would become more rigid in later generations, were remarkably flexible and fluid in the pre-Depression period. It’s fairly common for Morse to yodel, country-style, in the middle of a Tin Pan Alley anthem (like the 1927 “Side by Side”) or stretch a note and moan like Jimmie Rodgers.
Ramona (born Estrild Raymona Myers) is principally known for her work with bandleader Paul Whiteman, not only singing with his orchestra but on a series of small band dates done under the Whiteman imprimatur with some of the big band’s key players. Ramona’s overall sound is more reminiscent of a theater soprano of the period than of a blues or jazz singer, even when she’s singing in tempo or scatting, and her singing is sometimes slightly flat. (This is a rare complaint to level against a pianist-singer—you would think knowing her way around a keyboard would help her sing in tune.) Yet she left us with several dozen worthy period recordings of some very essential songs between 1932 and 1936. (The 1998 CD Ramona and Her Grand Piano, on the Old Masters label, is easily recommended.)
The prolific careers of Lee Morse and Ramona are just two examples of female pianist-singers who existed before 1934; but that year, when RCA Victor launched the Fats Waller and His Rhythm series, the genre as a whole was reinvented from the ground up. The success of Waller’s Rhythm discs had a double-pronged effect: Like Louis Armstrong before him, Waller inspired many an instrumentalist—piano players in particular—to start singing. At the same time, the record labels and song publishers decided that snappy small group recordings, driven by a jocular, powerful personality, were just the thing to fill the jukeboxes that were then being installed in bars, restaurants, and roadhouses across the country. Juke discs could be sold at a profit for 35 cents, which, at five cents a play, were a solid investment for these venues. Patrons would hear the new songs in a movie or on the radio and then start dropping nickels in the slots to dance to the same songs in these informal settings. It was more of a bargain than going dancing in an actual nightspot with a live band, and also cheaper than buying the records and taking them home.
By 1935, all of Victor’s competitors were releasing lively discs by small groups, which often featured many of the key soloists who were also working nightly in the big bands. The most celebrated series, after Waller’s, was the Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra line on ARC, in which the young Billie Holiday did most of the singing.
In 1935, Decca launched a series by Dick Robertson, a veteran session singer, who had a knack for getting a lyric out with a clear, empathetic voice. The Robertson sessions featured many key white players; he had particular luck with trumpeters, since both Bunny Berigan and Bobby Hackett turn up on his dates. Decca also produced a string of sessions spotlighting the Wallerian singer (and occasional pianist) Bob Howard, which, in turn, featured many of the major black swing musicians; Benny Carter, Buster Bailey, Teddy Wilson, Cozy Cole, and Clarence Holiday (the guitarist who was Billie Holiday’s father) all play on Howard’s first Decca session, in January 1935.
But when, two months later in March, Decca recorded the first session by Cleo Brown, something new had unquestionably been added. Trumpetersinger Scat Davis, Bob Howard, and especially Dick Robertson were all, to a degree, known commodities in the record business, but this was the first time Brown had been in a recording studio. She was somewhat known on the radio; she had, in fact, come to New York expressly to fill in for Fats Waller on CBS when the Portly One was summoned to Hollywood to make his first film.
Brown was born in Mississippi in 1909, where her father was the pastor of the Pilgrim Baptist Church, but she grew up in Chicago. As she later told Whitney Balliett, she studied piano from an early age, but her parents forbade her to play jazz and blues and other species of that Devil music. To her chagrin, her brother was already making $25 a week playing piano and consorting with such stars of the music as the legendary Pinetop Smith himself. Brown was not allowed to do as she wished until she left home at a very young age to get married and raise her son, LaVern. She worked as a solo act and in a band called the Nine Blackbirds, which took her as far afield as Canada, but she was back in Chicago when she got the call to come to New York and substitute for Fats Waller on his radio show, which apparently brought her to the attention of Decca.
Right off the bat, Brown’s first date produced five amazing tracks. She was an immediate hit with a genuinely swinging version of a popular novelty called “(Lookie! Lookie! Lookie!) Here Comes Cookie” and a cheery love song called “You’re a Heavenly Thing,” as well as “I’ll Take the South,” an ode to Dixie’s charms (cotton fields and Mammy’s arms) by a pair of songwriters who had probably never been south of Brooklyn. Then there was one of publisher-composer Clarence Williams’s many odes to getting high, “The Stuff Is Here and It’s Mellow.”
Although the inspiration was obviously Fats Waller, there was one immediate difference: Waller’s sessions always featured two or three heavy-duty saxophone or trumpet soloists, but Brown’s dates utilized rhythm sections only. The March 1935 date backed the newcomer with a highly accomplished (and, coincidentally, Caucasian) rhythm section: drummer Gene Krupa, about to be famous for his work with Benny Goodman; bassist Artie Bernstein, who would join Goodman a few years hence; and Perry Botkin (who would spend many years accompanying Bing Crosby) on guitar. Between the absence of horns and the singer’s higher-pitched voice, the Brown series was, on the whole, much lighter than the Waller Rhythm discs. Everything feels faster and higher on Brown’s sides, even though she uses the same kind of coloration in her singing, having developed a wide vocabulary of growls and purrs and other devices to animate her vocals.
As a kind of bonus track, Brown recorded a fifth side on the first session. After the rhythm section had packed up, she cut a solo treatment of the basic “Boogie Woogie” by Pinetop Smith, reprising the late pianist’s famous narration. Brown was ahead of the curve here, as boogie-woogie wouldn’t become a national trend for at least two years, and it wasn’t until still later that nearly all the major black female pianists would specialize in boogie. Brown recorded another piano solo, “Pelican Stomp,” at the end of a date in May, in which she appeared as the only black performer in a lineup billed as “the Decca All Star Revue.” Along with Bob Crosby, Scat Davis, Ella Logan, and the Tune Twisters vocal group, she sang part of “Way Back Home,” a much plugged tune of 1935 that didn’t quite become a standard.
She did her own second date in June 1935, followed by only two more sessions going up to April 1936 and resulting in a total of eighteen titles (not counting the two-sided “Way Back Home”). Nearly every title is something special: “Mama Don’t Want No Peas an’ Rice an’ Coconut Oil,” one of several pieces that combines an endearing childlike quality with an adult sensibility (i.e., a yearning to get high); “Breakin’ in a Pair of Shoes” brings a distinctly feminine angle to a catchy early swing hit; “Slow Poke” is an ingenious lyric variation on Johnny Mercer’s “Lazy Bones,” while “Love in the First Degree” transforms courtroom language into a love song in the manner of Waller’s “Where Were You on the Night of June the Third?” “My Gal Mezzanine” (yes, Mezzanine, possibly a reference to reefer peddler “Mezz” Mezzrow) is the most Walleresque of all, an infectious ode to a “red hot mama from Bahama with a red hot hootchy koo!” who happens to have a grandiosely absurd first name. “When Hollywood Goes Black and Tan” paraphrases the hi-de-ho’s of Cab Calloway’s (and Harold Arlen’s) “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day” to make for a delightful period piece praising African American entertainers in cinema, from Armstrong and Calloway to Decca’s own Bob Howard.
All these sides are collected on Here Comes Cleo, the single most essential Brown collection, on the Scottish Hep label. The Hep CD also includes four lovely tunes, very much in the Decca mold, done for a transcription service around the same time, among them “You’ve Got Me Under Your Thumb.” The latter tune was also recorded by Waller and His Rhythm in 1937 and Brown’s version by no means suffers in comparison.
Brown had already perfected a piano style that became a major inspiration to male and female players of a certain generation. As Dave Brubeck told radio journalist Sara Fishko (of WNYC), “She needed somebody to play intermissions for her, and somebody recommended me, and she was happy with me. And she gave me a note to take to Art Tatum and introduce myself. You see, I’m going from one of the greatest women pianists to the greatest man pianist! When Tatum read the note he asked me how Cleo was playing. And I said, ‘She’s got the fastest left hand I’ve ever heard!’ … Tatum was the God of the piano, [but] when Fats Waller died, the men in that band wanted Cleo to come in and take Fats’s place, that’s how great she was.”
Here Comes Cleo concludes with five somewhat risqué “party” records made for the under-the-counter Hollywood Hot Shots operation around 1936–37. The most memorable of these is “Who’ll Chop Your Suey When I’m Gone,” which Brown, with her girly style, makes into something more silly than sexual (“Who’ll clam your chowder?” “Who’ll tutti your frutti?”). Her treatment is also highly different—faster and zingier—from the way publisher Clarence Williams recorded it with the more traditional classic blues singer Margaret Johnson in 1925.
Which begs the question: For all the apparent success of Cleo Brown’s Decca recordings, why did the label stop recording her in mid-1936? Why was she relegated to a semianonymous West Coast label that manufactured dirty records for drunks at parties? In her major published interview (with Whitney Balliett), Brown doesn’t mention that her initial recording career lasted only eighteen sides and fewer than that many months. (Although, apparently, she went on broadcasting and playing major clubs.)
We’ll never know why Decca abruptly discontinued its relationship with Brown, or why none of the other labels picked her up at this point (she did do a few more recordings between 1949 and 1951, about which more later). But perhaps it’s not a coincidence that a few months after Brown’s last session, Decca launched a new series of small group dates built around the black female pianist—and sort of singer—Lil Hardin Armstrong. Hardin had already made a place for herself in musical history as the second wife of Louis Armstrong. She had been a pivotal influence, both professional and musical, in Armstrong’s early career, most importantly as the pianist with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and Armstrong’s own Hot Five and Seven sessions.
Why Decca spotlighted Hardin, who worked under the name of Lil Armstrong even though she was long divorced from the trumpeter, as a singer is a mystery. Her best-known vocal was on the famous Hot Seven side “That’s When I’ll Come Back to You,” where she banters agreeably in response to her husband’s pleading; this disc lays the foundation for Louis Prima and Keely Smith. Mrs. Armstrong was a credible pianist in the early jazz mold, and an essential part of the greatest jazz records ever made. However, even though she recorded a couple of other vocals on various dates produced by Clarence Williams, she would never really establish her bona fides in the singing department.
The Decca series of 1936–40 is a puzzlement, especially since she primarily sings on the twenty-four titles while Billy Kyle, Frank Froeba, and others play piano; yet before, during, and after these years Hardin worked as a session pianist on many dates with various blues singers—she was a fine accompanist, yet she just doesn’t seem to have played much piano on her own dates. As a singer, Hardin is a yelper, and her vocals are not the most salient feature of these sides, which have been reissued mainly because they spotlight expert black swing soloists like Charlie Shavers, Buster Bailey, Chu Berry, Joe Thomas, and company.
Hardin’s most valid contribution to her own dates is as composer: Her name is on most of the songs here, and one of these, “Just for a Thrill,” grew up to become a true standard. First recorded at her initial Decca date in 1936 in Chicago, “Just for a Thrill,” recorded definitively by Ray Charles and which is sometimes co-credited to pianist-songwriter Don Raye, became a forerunner of the postwar R&B soul ballad. Hardin’s so-so singing on her 1936–40 Decca dates is beside the point; Lil Hardin Armstrong made a major contribution to American music.
Hardin’s Decca sides are much more boisterous and noisy than Brown’s, given her intimate though energetic vocals and piano solos. Yet because of the timing, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Decca dropped Brown in favor of Hardin.
Brown didn’t record again until thirteen years later, when she did a pleasant date of four titles for Capitol in 1949. Since Capitol was actively recording both Nellie Lutcher and Julia Lee, they were obviously cornering the market on brilliant, bluesy, Fats Waller–inspired female pianist-singers. Brown’s four Capitols are a respectalde enough follow-up to the (now) classic Deccas, starting with a fast “Cleo’s Boogie,” a piano solo with occasional blues vocal interjections (including a paraphrase of a territory blues standard recorded as “The Duck’s Yas-Yas”); then there’s an amiable update of the twenties standard “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain,” and two more risqué blues novelties, “Cook That Stuff” and “Don’t Overdo It.” The producer obviously appreciated Brown’s 1935–36 sides enough to maintain what was good about them, such as the accompanying rhythm section, using two famous New Orleanians, guitarist Nappy Lamare and drummer Zutty Singleton. The Capitol session failed to make any impact; when Billboard reviewed it, they even dismissed Brown as a Julia Lee imitator, describing “Cook That Stuff” as a “novelty reminiscent of Julia Lee’s ‘Snatch and Grab It’ but much bluer.”
In 1950, Brown recorded two syrupy children’s songs (“Two Little Twains” and the lachrymose “Coffee Colored Child,” along with, frustratingly, ten unissued titles) for Albert Marx’s Discovery Records, and a year later cut her two final singles, a pair of nondescript blues titles, for the independent Blue Records. It could be that her career was then in decline, but in her interview with Balliett, Brown, whose father had been a Baptist pastor, states that she got religion, felt the spirit coming on, and sensed the need to get out of showbiz altogether; in 1953 she became a Seventh Day Adventist. Now calling herself “Cleo Patra Brown,” she spent roughly twenty years helping to cure people’s bodies and souls, laboring as a hospital worker and praying fiercely at every opportunity.
Despite her small output, Cleo Brown’s music was enormously influential: Obviously both Nellie Lutcher and Julia Lee (who was older) were heavily inspired by her work, Lutcher crediting Brown’s disc of “You’re a Heavenly Thing” with launching the trend for female pianists. Both Marian McPartland and Bobby Short became major fans. As Short told Balliett, “We were attracted to her sweet, sexy voice and her brilliant left hand—and her time, which was fantastic.” Short also noted that a minister in his hometown, Danville, Illinois, was so moved by Brown’s theme song, “The Stuff Is Here and It’s Mellow,” that he transformed it into a sermon. That news might have been encouraging to Brown, since she wanted to get away from those salacious songs about sex and substances and errant lovers who chop each other’s suey.
It was McPartland who made it a personal mission to find Cleo Brown, and eventually tracked her down in Denver. In 1987, McPartland brought her to New York so she could appear on McPartland’s Piano Jazz, which was a dream come true for the Queen Mum of Jazz. (The show was eventually released on CD by Audiophile Records as Living in the Afterglow, with McPartland guesting on four titles.) Even after the show and the album, as well as a profile in The New Yorker by Balliett, there was never a full-fledged Cleo Brown revival or even a real return to performing. She died in 1995, and the big event of her later life was being named as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts. In the twenty-five-plus years that the NEA Jazz Masters Award has been in existence, Cleo Brown is quite probably its most obscure recipient, but far from its least worthy. She can chop my suey anytime.
After Brown (and, to an extent, Hardin), the next femme follower of Fats was Waller’s lover and protégée Una Mae Carlisle. Waller first heard her in 1932, the story goes, when he was doing a radio series entitled Fats Waller’s Rhythm Club out of station WLW in Cincinnati. She was seventeen at the time, having been born in nearby Xenia, Ohio. Waller immediately took a keen interest—both professional and personal—in the attractive and talented youngster, and persuaded her mother to let Una Mae (she pronounced it “You-na”) appear regularly on his program. When he launched his big band at New York’s world-famous Apollo Theater in 1935, Carlisle was on hand as his girl singer. By 1937, like several other African American female entertainers, she had found work in Europe (apparently under her own power, without Waller’s help). She was working at Le Boeuf sur le Toit in Paris when she had the good fortune to be heard by the British critic-composer-producer Leonard Feather, who wrote about her enthusiastically for Melody Maker.
Feather was moved to produce Carlisle’s premier recording date, in London for British Vocalion in May 1938, at which the first tune was the producer-songwriter’s own agreeable rhythm number “Don’t Try Your Jive on Me.” On this well-balanced session, Feather also had her do one straight-up blues, “Hangover Blues” (for which the two shared composer credit), one jived-up standard, “Mean to Me,” one relatively new song, the first-rate “Love Walked In” by the Gershwin brothers, and, appropriately, one Fats Waller favorite, “I’m Crazy ’Bout My Baby.” Although Carlisle would keep working until the fifties, these five tunes are easily her overall finest: She sings and plays with an ebullience and energy that’s sorely missing from most of her subsequent recordings. On “Mean to Me” she verbally encourages her British sidemen to “swing it on out there,” and, among other Wallerian asides, she closes the tune with an affirmative “Yes! Yes!” If all of UMC’s recordings were of this caliber, she would have had a much bigger place in music history.
Later that year, she reunited with Waller, who was then touring Europe; Carlisle was sick at the time, and he visited her at a London hospital. (In typical Fats fashion, he had such a good time hanging out with her that he missed an important performance.) She next recorded strictly as guest pianist with Danny Polo on a Feather-produced date (which included the celebrated Argentine guitarist Oscar Alemán) in Paris, in January 1939. At the end of the year, she was back in the States, and made what would probably be her most famous appearance on a record, singing a duet with Waller on “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” as part of the Waller Rhythm series on Bluebird. She made the right decision not to sing in the Waller style when duetting with the man himself—after all, there was no need for two Fats Wallers on the same side. She also knew that it wouldn’t pay to attempt to be funny in Waller’s presence, and so she sings the Fields-McHugh standard relatively straight. As a result, she comes off as something of a wet blanket, while Waller supplies all the fun here. Still, it’s a classic side.
Did Waller have a hand in seeing that Carlisle began to record regularly as a featured star for Victor’s subsidiary Bluebird? One never knows, do one? Her first date, perhaps not coincidentally, featured the musicians from Waller’s own band (though not the Fat One himself) as her accompaniment. Her first three American dates come closest to the 1938 London session in quality and spirit, even though she only plays piano on the first two. After the date with Waller’s Rhythm band, her next session featured Benny Carter (undoubtedly also a friend from Europe) playing trumpet obbligatos behind her, and then came the most reissued of UMC’s recordings, a March 1941 Bluebird date in which her accompaniment was Lester Young. This session includes a famous topical blues that begins with the following couplet, designed to zing both Hitler and Stalin nine months before Pearl Harbor: “Blitzkrieg Baby, you can’t bomb me / Because I’m pleading neutrality.” It’s a funny line, although UMC doesn’t seem to be having much in the way of fun with it—or with the song in general. (All twenty-one of her first sides, including the duet with Waller, are included on the Classics release Una Mae Carlisle, 1938–1941, which contains all of her essential recordings.)
Perhaps by 1941 Carlisle wanted to develop an identity of her own, rather than just serve as Fats’s female emissary and occasional playmate. She recorded another fifty or so sides between 1941 and 1950 (which are on two more Classics volumes, 1941–1944 and 1944–1950), but few of these are anywhere near as interesting as her sides from 1938 to 1940 and earlier. Carlisle stopped playing piano on most of her dates, and she stopped the jivey, Wallerian asides—in general, her output became overwhelmingly tepid. Based on the bulk of her forties work, Carlisle is not nearly in a class with Cleo Brown, Julia Lee, Hadda Brooks, and especially Nellie Lutcher. It’s hard to listen to a whole CD of UMC uninterrupted, despite the high caliber of her sidemen and backup bands. These included, on sixteen titles from 1941 to 1942, the entire John Kirby Sextet; even here, Carlisle does not compare with Maxine Sullivan or Mildred Bailey, who both recorded classic sides with the JK6.
One area where Carlisle, like Lil Hardin Armstrong, made an important contribution was as a composer. Her name is on two very successful songs from 1941, “Walkin’ by the River” and “I See a Million People.” Her gifts as a songwriter were probably what attracted the attention of publisher and producer Joe Davis, who was the primary publisher for Waller’s closest composing collaborator, lyricist Andy Razaf.
After the AFM ban, Carlisle began recording for the Joe Davis label, and later there were dates for Savoy, National, and even Columbia (two sessions in which she was backed by pioneer arranger Don Redman and white bandleader Bob Chester). Most of these are fairly ho-hum affairs; she just doesn’t do anything particularly interesting with her voice, and doesn’t bring anything special to her interpretations.
Carlisle’s final recording session, included at the end of the last Classics volume, is an out-and-out mystery: six singles tracks, apparently done for a privately released three-disc album pressed by RCA. Each track consists of three short original solo piano instrumentals, bearing titles like “A Rhythm Mood,” “Escape to Nowhere,” and “Jumpin’ with the Stars,” each lasting about a minute, introduced vocally by “You-na Mae” as she refers to herself. More than this I cannot tell you.
The health issues that plagued her back in Europe were still, unfortunately, in the picture. “Perhaps because of a lifestyle as self-indulgent as Fats’s own, Una Mae never reached the plateau of fame to which her talent and beauty might have been expected to bring her,” Leonard Feather wrote. “She was only thirty-seven, when, inactive and forgotten, she died in Ohio, where she was born.” There’s some confusion regarding these details: Feather and Ira Gitler’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz tell us she was born in 1915 and died in 1956 in New York. Assuming these latter dates are correct, Una Mae Carlisle was actually forty, just a few months older than Waller at the time of his death in 1943.
Thus for whatever reason, there never was a completely satisfying Femme Follower of Fats during Waller’s own lifetime; the two strongest contenders, Cleo Brown and Una Mae Carlisle, were both disappointments, the first in terms of quantity, the second in terms of quality. However, after the war, Waller’s two principal heiresses took the stage almost simultaneously.
Julia Lee and Nellie Lutcher were two very distinct individuals, but they were more alike than they were different. They were products of the world’s two greatest jazz territories, Lee from Kansas City, Lutcher from New Orleans. They each came to fame recording for Capitol in 1946 and then 1947. Guided by producer Dave Dexter, himself a Kansas City native, between them they provided Capitol with a steady stream of hits for a few years in the late forties, and they helped establish the label’s presence in the field then known as “race music”
Lee and Lutcher both worked with groups modeled loosely after Waller’s Rhythm: Lee’s band was billed on the Capitol labels as “Her Boy Friends”; Lutcher’s group was credited as “Nellie Lutcher and Her Rhythm.” They both played a key role in the evolution of black music, as small group swing and the juke-jazz style of the thirties morphed into what became known as rhythm and blues. Unfortunately, by the time that phrase was coined, both their careers had peaked. They both also sang a mixture of blues and standards and, further, there was a high sexual content to their work, which was, however, expressed in different ways. (Also, not coincidentally, they both were the subject of lavish and thoroughly deserved complete boxed sets from the German boutique label Bear Family, both with elaborate booklets and excellent biographical essays by the British scholar Bill Millar.)
Julia Lee was born in Kansas City in 1902 to a very musical family: Her father played violin and her older brother, George E. Lee, played saxophone and occasionally sang. Both father and brother led bands, and, eventually, so would she. The younger Lee was a formally trained pianist, as much as it was possible for an African American female to be early in the twentieth century; she made a serious study of theory and sight-reading at both Lincoln High School and Western University. She picked up jazz, however, somewhat less formally; in Kansas City in the immediate pre–Jazz Age, it would have been hard for her to avoid exposure to ragtime and the blues. Lee’s career as a live performer divides into two distinct extended gigs. First, for fifteen years (1918–1933) she primarily played piano and occasionally sang in her brother’s various bands. Then, as a solo act, she spent the next sixteen years (1934–1950) working as the regular attraction at Milton’s Tap Room, one of Kaycee’s top nightspots.
Lee first recorded as a pianist with George E. Lee’s Novelty Singing Orchestra (then in residence at the Novelty Club) in 1929. At this time, she also recorded two exuberant performances as a solo vocalist. One was the pop song “He’s Tall, Dark and Handsome,” in which Lee, singing of her attraction to a “dark” man, obviously gave the song an entirely different connotation than when it was performed by a white act, like Ted Weems and His Orchestra. The other was the older, more folk-rooted “Won’t You Come over to My House?” Although the latter song was based in the blues, and this was still the era of the great classic blues singers, Lee sounds nothing like Bessie Smith—or even Ethel Waters. At this point in her development, she’s an extravagant belter, more like Tess Gardella, Sophie Tucker, or any number of white singers on Broadway, but with more of a blues sensibility and a jazzy sense of time.
It was the writer and producer Dave Dexter who brought both Lee and then Lutcher to Capitol Records. He had begun his career covering music in his hometown for Down Beat and other publications, then made a lateral move, professionally, to producing sessions with local artists (including the formidable Big Joe Turner). He moved to Chicago and next to Los Angeles, where he went to work with Capitol, then only in business for a few months. He had grown up hearing Julia Lee around KC, and his first idea was to include her as part of a historically oriented album of Kansas City jazz he was producing for Capitol in 1944. She did two sides for the package, the first of which was a swing-styled update of “Won’t You Come Over to My House?,” the other the blues standard “Trouble in Mind.” Back in Kansas City the following year, she made four tunes (mostly blues, all credited to her) released on the Premier label.
Lee’s two sides for the Kansas City album proved popular enough for Capitol to offer her a contract of her own. Her two peak years for the label were 1946 and 1947; she was still working nightly at Milton’s Tap Room in Missouri, but she made the pilgrimage to California to do a batch of sessions in August 1946 and June 1947. She returned for a third series of Capitol dates in November 1947, just in time to get some sides in before the 1948 recording ban. After the ban, in 1949, she resumed recording, but for the remainder of her association with Capitol the label allowed her to work in Kansas City, thus relieving her of having to make that killer commute to the Left Coast.
As Bill Millar notes, where most of the major labels had a “race” and a “hillbilly” division, in the mid-forties Capitol launched a series called “Americana” that catered to both the blues and country markets. The label’s first big stars in the “race” area were Nat Cole, Lee, and then Lutcher. Undoubtedly, being based in KC hurt Lee’s recording career—if Capitol wanted someone to cover a new song, like right now, they obviously weren’t going to bring in Lee from Missouri; they’d give it to someone more conveniently located, usually Lutcher, who lived for most of her life in L.A.
With Dexter’s help, Lee seems to have generated most of her own material, which, for the most part, consisted of salacious variations on the blues. Then, to prove that man (or woman) does not live by blues alone, she also occasionally recorded vintage jazz and pop standards that were already part of her Tap Room repertoire; the old Kansas City favorite “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” was a natural. Unlike Lutcher, Lee included virtually no new plug songs in her sessions.
Dexter quickly discovered what Lee already knew: that she would get the biggest response with double entendre, risqué blues that combined sex and comedy. Her two best-remembered titles are “Snatch and Grab It” and “King Sized Papa”; the first is allegedly about opportunity(“Grab it before it gets away”), the second is supposedly about a very tall man (“There’s such a lot of him, the way he grew / Enough to last till 1992”), but there was no mistaking what Lee was really singing about. Both songs, like nearly all her recordings, are animated by the impeccable sense of rhythm that’s necessary both for comedy and the blues. Although just about all her songs concern themselves with Topic A, she finds infinite variety in even the thinnest of metaphors; in “I’ve Got a Crush on the Fuller Brush Man,” she tells us of how her favorite traveling salesman “scrubs my vestibule, my back porch too.” In “My Man Stands Out,” she tells us, “Down at the beach when we walk by / The other girls give him the eye.”
Lee was especially enamored of using food as a metaphor, as in “The Spinach Song” (“I didn’t like it the first time / But oh how it grew on me!”), “All This Beef and Big Ripe Tomatoes” (no explanation necessary), and “I Was Wrong (The Diet Song),” another ode about giving in to temptation. (Too bad that she never reprised Cleo Brown’s “Who’ll Chop Your Suey When I’m Gone.”) Still, she doesn’t need sex to make food, drink, and other substances sound interesting: On “Last Call for Alcohol” it’s easy to imagine her barking out to elbow-bending patrons at 6 a.m.—oven as they fall off their stools—“Drink up, drink up, then order again!” and closing with “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” And there are still other indulgences: “Dream Lucky” is about gambling, specifically playing the numbers, built around a phrase that fellow Kansas Cityites Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing used in “Jimmy’s Blues.” “Wise Guys” is addressed to ne’er-do-well characters who join the rackets to avoid honest labor. “At the end of your game / You get a number for a name,” she admonishes. “Why, most of your mothers hang their heads in shame.”
Lee’s most overt song about unsavory habits did not, surprisingly, originate as part of the blues or “Americana” tradition, but was a number from a Hollywood musical. In 1934, the lyricist and later producer Sam Coslow wrote “Marihuana” (sometimes called “Sweet Marijuana”) for the film Murder at the Vanities. Reefer was then still legal in many states, but it was already a taboo and risqué subject for a mainstream pop song. At some later point, Coslow changed the title, and some of the lyrics with it, to “Lotus Blossom.” That it was a permanent part of Lee’s repertoire is evidenced by her recording it three times, once for Premier and twice for Capitol, under both titles, although Capitol only issued the “Lotus” version at the time. (In all three labels, she received the composing credit.) Under both titles, “Marihuana” is not about getting high and having a good time; this isn’t Cab Calloway extolling the joys of viperhood or Bessie Smith joyfully demanding pigfeet and beer. “Marihuana” is a song of addiction and regret. Lee’s heroine wants to give up smoking dope but she just can’t say no to the escape that narcotics provide her. Addressing the drug directly in the second person, Lee sings, “You alone can bring my lover back to me.” She sings with the remorse of a major blues singer doing a sad blues, combining sex and drugs, euphoria and melancholy, into one especially potent cocktail.
Lee’s voice is a lot darker and deeper than Cleo Brown’s, Nellie Lutcher’s, or Rose Murphy’s—Brown and Murphy, in particular, are trilly sopranos, while Lee is a confirmed contralto; she’s also much less likely to animate her lyrics with vocal effects, trills, and melismas. Her singing is direct and forthright, whether it’s a raucous party blues (like “Come on Over to My House”) or an old weepie (like “My Mother’s Eyes”). She tempers both, making the first less one-dimensional and the second less overtly sentimental. Two titles recorded back to back in 1949 show how she could extract the same meaning from songs of widely different contexts: “You Ain’t Got It No More” and “When Your Lover Has Gone.”
Perhaps Lee’s recording career petered out because she avoided contemporary and mainstream material and concentrated so exclusively on saucy blues and old standards; Dinah Washington, who was just launching her career at this point, would qucikly prove it was possible to sing just about anything with a blue point of view. After the 1948 ban, Capitol was recording Lee less and less frequently: twelve titles in 1949, eight in 1950, four in 1951, six in 1952, and the majority of these were not issued at the time. The 1952 date was her last for the label, though she did record a couple of later dates for smaller, Kansas City–based operations. Julia Lee died of heart disease in 1958—in Kansas City, of course—aged fifty-six. The Bear Family collection of her complete recordings (including all the unissued Capitol masters) concludes with “Rock and Bop Lullaby,” which begins, “Rock me a ragtime tune, bop me some swing till noon,” as if Lee was determined to take every genre she had ever worked in and combine them all into one song. Then again, she had been doing that all along.
If Una Mae Carlisle was Waller’s squeeze and Julia Lee seemed more like his older sibling, then Nellie Lutcher was his kid sister. We celebrate Lee for her directness, even in metaphor-driven, double entendre blues lyrics. Nellie Lutcher’s greatest asset is her playfulness. By way of comparison, the two of them shared a signature song, or, at least, a piece of material they developed independently from a folk-blues source. Lee first recorded it in 1929 as “Won’t You Come Over to My House” and then again in 1944, on her first Capitol date, as “Come on Over to My House”; Lutcher called her version “Hurry on Down,” and also recorded it at her own first Capitol session, in 1947. They are similar enough to be considered variations on the same material: Lee sings, “Come on over to my house, baby / Nobody home but me,” and Lutcher coos, “Hurry on down to my house, baby / Ain’t nobody home but me.”
With Lee, you somehow assume the song is being sung by a housewife whose kids are at school and whose husband is at work; Lutcher, in contrast, sounds like a teenaged girl whose parents have stepped out to catch a triple feature of Hopalong Cassidy. The way Lee sings it there’s no doubt what she has in mind; with Lutcher, you’re relatively sure, but it also sounds as if she could be looking for a play date and not necessarily in the amorous sense … really. Lee sings it with total deliberateness; even though it’s fast and exciting, every word and every intention is crystal clear. Lutcher sings it as fast as humanly possible, without apparent regard to intelligibility, knowing that audiences wouldn’t miss her larger point. Her special effects, her yelps and squeals, are more important than the actual words.
Lutcher’s recording of “Hurry on Down” and her career as a recording artist in general came about after she had been working hard in dozens of joints in Los Angeles’s black neighborhoods for a decade. “My life turned around in 1947,” she told Whitney Balliett. “I’d been plugging along in Los Angeles for ten years when—wham!—Dave Dexter heard me on a March of Dimes radio show. I did ‘The One I Love (Belongs to Somebody Else),’ ‘Hurry on Down,’ and ‘He’s a Real Gone Guy,’ both of which I wrote. When I woke up, I found that I had a couple of hits. A couple of weeks later, he signed me to a contract.” A few sessions after that, she had her third big hit, “Fine Brown Frame”; that year, Billboard magazine named her second out of the four “Top Female Vocalists on Race Records” (she came in after Julia Lee and ahead of Dinah Washington and Rose Murphy).
Nellie Lutcher was born on October 15, 1912 (older sources say 1915), in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a small town under the geographical and cultural sway of New Orleans. (She would immortalize the town in her “Lake Charles Boogie” of 1947.) Her father drove a truck and played bass in the Imperial Jazz Band. She grew up equally under the influence of the local church and the nearby all-black theater, and like Lee had formal piano lessons and serious training. Her piano professor, Mrs. Reynaud (a very Creole-sounding name), was such an accomplished sight reader that “if there was a fly sitting on the sheet music, she’d play that too.” By the twenties, Nellie was serving as pianist with her dad and the Imperial Jazz Band. In 1933 she worked with the Southern Rhythm Boys, under the direction of clarinetist Paul Barnes.
In 1935, after hearing from several friends and relatives that things were easier for black people in California, Lutcher moved to Los Angeles. She landed a gig at the Dunbar Hotel, leading her own trio (rather than serving in the rhythm section of a larger group), and it was at this time that she first began to sing. She quickly integrated herself into the city’s vibrant black music scene, which, though barely recorded during the swing era (Los Angeles was just another territory then), would play a key role in the development of rhythm and blues. She became friendly with the Cole brothers, bassist Eddie and pianist Nat, not long after they arrived from Chicago. Had more record companies been paying attention to the L.A. scene, Lutcher would doubtless not have had to wait until she was thirty-five to make her first disc.
Capitol was the first nationally distributed major label to profit from the local talent on Central Avenue, starting with Nat King Cole; by the time Lee and then Lutcher were signed to the label, Cole was already attracting white listeners as well as black. The label already had Julia Lee under contract, but it was plain that Lutcher could have potentially greater pop appeal; besides which, as we have seen, it was easier to get Lutcher into the studio, logistically speaking. With Lee, Dexter seems to have been more of a documentarian, letting her put down repertoire that she had already been singing for years for patrons in Kansas City. With Lutcher, Dexter took a more proactive role as a hands-on producer and A&R man. Lutcher also had the good sense to sign with Cole’s manager, Carlos Gastel, who already had a track record for making stars out of black and jazz talent.
Lutcher occasionally did a Lee-style double entendre blues, like her 1947 “There’s Another Mule in Your Stall,” but she sings it playfully, bouncing up and down in her characteristic flea-on-a-hot-brick style. On the whole, Our Nellie is much more wholesome, more childlike than naughty Aunt Julia. In 1950–51, Lutcher recorded two additional songs about inviting company over that could function as sequels to “Hurry on Down”: “Pa’s Not Home—Ma’s Upstairs” and “Can I Come in for a Second.” The first is more about the tender trap than an erotic romp: Even though she promises her boyfriend that her parents aren’t around (“The front door’s locked and the back won’t budge / So why are we chewing on chocolate fudge?”), it turns out that Ma and Pa are in on the fix, hoping she can ensnare him into a proposal.
“Can I Come in for a Second” reverses the equation: Here, it’s the young man who is begging and pleading to be invited inside after a date. The track is done as a duet between Lutcher and her old friend Nat Cole, and illustrates the differences between the two: The King is smooth and cool to the max, even when playing the horny young swain, and Lutcher is frisky and girly and squeally even when slamming the door in his face. When he tells her he wants her to put her heart into a kiss, she positively shrieks, “That’s the only way I kiss!” The song is one of the few with both music and words by Sammy Cahn (although the bridge seems inspired by “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”), and I don’t doubt that Sammy penned the dialogue between the two as well. He: “I have a lot of investments to consider … I brought you home in a taxi.” She: “If that wasn’t a bus it was the biggest taxi I ever saw!”
“Little Sally Walker” is Lutcher’s own transformation of a nursery rhyme (earlier swung by Al Cooper and the Savoy Sultans) into a modern love ballad, complete with a new verse. She constantly combines the childish element with the sexual one: She had likely been singing “Princess Poo-Poo-Ly Has Plenty Papaya” since 1939, when it was recorded by Abe Lyman and his Californians. The song begins, “Princess Poo-Poo-Ly has plenty papaya / She loves to give it away,” and it’s possible to take this either as a sexual euphemism or just enjoy its sheer silliness—it works either way in Lutcher’s delightful performance. The fun is keenly enhanced by the way she plays with words, the rhythmic repetitiveness of all those P sounds. Her timing is, as always, impeccable, especially in the coda and in the composer’s vaudeville asides: “She loves to give it away—I mean papaya / She loves to give it away—got plenty of it / She loves to give it away—crazy girl!” (Once, in an after-hours session at the Café Carlyle, I was privileged to hear Bobby Short sing “Princess Poo-Poo-Ly” and share his memories of Nellie.)
“Princess Poo-Poo-Ly” is one of many examples of Lutcher combining scat singing and traditional lyrics; she favors songs that turn words into pure sonics, like the geographically motivated “Chi-Chi-Chicago” and “I Wish I Was in Walla-Walla”; then there’s “Pig Latin Song,” which begins “I-way ove-yay ou-yay oney-hay.” “Lutcher’s Leap” is a wordless scat epic, possibly inspired by Gene Krupa’s “What’s This” and Nat Cole’s response, “That’s What.” In “The Dog Fight Song” she not only repeats the names of the two doggies, “Ming Toy” and “Prince,” over and over in a childish-canine way, but supplies plenty of delightfully doggy sound effects, yelps and barks and bow-wows. In “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” she launches into a particularly exuberant, chirpy scat episode that evolves into a series of imitations of the various instruments in the titular ensemble. This is distinctly inspired by Fats Waller, who launched a tradition of doing untraditional things with his voice (such as rapidly alternating between baritone and falsetto registers), and has little in common with Lutcher’s contemporaries in early R&B like Nat Cole and Louis Jordan.
Like Waller, Lutcher has a serious side as well; she’ll address the occasional standard, like “My Man,” without joking it up. Lee’s most incongruous recording was a boogie-woogie treatment of the traditional Italian song “Oh Marie,” and Lutcher, for her part, made what was, for her, a straight version of “Cool Water.” She sings the cowboy classic surprisingly convincingly, even though it’s not exactly easy to imagine Miss Lutcher crossing the barren waste on a horse named Dan. Her most arresting side of a noncomic nature is “A Maid’s Prayer,” which has a strong undercurrent of irony. A prescient prequel to Arthur Prysock’s “Working Man’s Prayer,” this is a semispoken, all-rubato monologue in which a working girl speculates about what existence will be like for a domestic in the hereafter. When she crosses the river Jordan, will she still have to make the beds and empty the garbage cans? Will she have to polish the stars and hang them out? She recites,
I know I will be discouraged
I know I will be dismayed
If I should be a maid in Heaven
And still be underpaid.
My favorite Nellie Lutcher track is neither one of her originals nor a blues, but a contemporary pop novelty that was more likely Capitol’s idea than her own. “Kiss Me Sweet” was a 1949 hit for sweet bandleader Sammy Kaye (of “Swing and Sway” fame) written by Milton Drake, most of whose hits were of the novelty nature; I first heard it sung in a Warner Bros. cartoon by Tweety Bird (of Tweety and Sylvester fame). Mel Blanc, supplying the bird’s voice, chirped it in a high-pitched caricature of a child’s way of speaking, overflowing with infantile impediments (“Kiss me tweet”), but he sounds positively restrained compared to Lutcher. Her performance is by far the more compelling, first because she accentuates the correct parts of the beat and cuts off the right notes in the right places to make the piece really swing; the best the song’s other interpreters can manage is to get it to bounce. (She makes it even more musically interesting by adding a key change to the bridge.)
Her recording boasts an attractive wordless episode, wherein she exchanges phrases, both from the keyboard and scatting, with guitarist John Collins (later with Nat Cole for many years). But it’s what she does with the song’s plain-vanilla lyric that’s really remarkable. As written, “Kiss Me Sweet” (which begins “Kiss me sweet, kiss me simple / Kiss me on my little dimple”) has a nursery rhyme simplicity. The song is just “Kiss me this” and “Kiss me that” over and over again, but Lutcher brilliantly animates the text by making its relentless repetition into a virtue: When she sings “Kiss me slow, kiss me dreamy / Kiss me every time you see me,” she elongates the first adjective and makes the second sound wistful; on “Kiss me plain, kiss me fancy,” she makes those words sound so plain and so fancy she could be singing in ancient Aramaic and you still would know what she meant.
Lutcher and Lee don’t seem to have been rivals, nor did Lutcher necessarily ascend as Lee’s star went the other way; the glory years for both were the immediate postwar period. Maybe there was room in the market for only one of them, and Lutcher and Lee somehow just canceled each other out (and leave us not forget that Rose Murphy was also recording by 1947). Both lost ground when the 1948 recording ban hit, at which point Capitol tried the curious move of bringing in a third Femme Follower of Fats, none other than Cleo Brown herself, for a single session. Like Lee, Lutcher was undergoing a process of diminishing returns: two sessions in 1949, two in 1950 and 1951. Still, her discs did well in England, where she made a very well received appearance in September 1950.
The bulk of Lutcher’s sessions employed just a rhythm section, in contrast to the all-star horn men who guested with Julia Lee’s Boyfriends. In 1951, Dexter tried stirring the mixture by backing Lutcher with Billy May’s full orchestra, this being several weeks before he conducted his first date accompanying Nat Cole in a similar manner. The results were successful artistically though they made little impact commercially. Especially swell are two twenties standards, “Mean to Me” and “Birth of the Blues,” which feature May’s already perfected slurping saxophone sound, and make for a wonderful sonic cushion to support Lutcher on. “Let the Worry Bird Worry for You,” despite an ungainly title, is a worthy new swinger by Jule Styne and Leo Robin (from Two Tickets to Broadway). The oddest track is “I Want to Be Near You,” a vigorous march in which May makes the ensemble sound like a college football brass band, seventy-six trombones waiting for Meredith Willson, complete with a chanting choir clapping their hands on the best deep-in-the-heart-of-Texas style. Even in this most Caucasian context, a production that sounds like an idea Mitch Miller might have come up with, Lutcher makes everything swing.
Capitol followed this semisuccess with a less interesting date in which Lutcher was backed by Hal Mooney, who was then Kay Starr’s regular accompanist. The model seems to have been Nat Cole’s many dates with string sections, but the charts weren’t nearly up to what Nelson Riddle was writing for Cole. Following this, between 1952 and 1954 Lutcher relocated to Okeh and then Decca, and made some very agreeable small group sessions that are fully on a par with her best Capitol work. She’s particularly winning on a 1953 L.A. session that begins with “Whee Baby,” a bluesy novelty by Peggy (not Julia) Lee, in which the musical director was Peggy’s ex-husband, guitarist Dave Barbour. For a date on Okeh, Columbia’s “race” subsidiary, it sounds exactly like a Capitol production.
If the Okeh date has overtones of Peggy Lee, Lutcher’s two Decca dates bring to mind Louis Jordan; Jordan’s producer, Milt Gabler, was probably involved, even though the first session transpired in Los Angeles. The highlights are a pair of standards by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, a fine “Blues in the Night” and a marvelous recasting of “Out of This World” into a Tympany Five–style shuffle rhythm; the twenties standard “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze” is also reanimated with fast-moving Latinate percussion. Her original “It’s Been Said” quotes “As Time Goes By” (“Woman needs man and man must have his mate”) but is otherwise exactly the kind of thing Jordan was doing all along, even though there’s no mistaking Lutcher’s trademarks: the trilly scatting and emphasis on repeated phrases in a fast, telegraphic tempo (“It’s a fact, it’s a fact, it’s a natural fact”). Lutcher recorded it twice, and the second time (a date produced by Sy Oliver), the band chants behind her; the combination of the speedy tempo, the somewhat surly singing group, and the overall spirit of the piece are very similar to Jordan’s 1949 “Safe, Sane, and Single.”
As with Lee’s, the entire Nellie Lutcher Bear Family package is well worth owning—there truly isn’t a bad track among the 105 included on the five discs. You might expect her to now enter a period of artistic decline, but she doesn’t. Lutcher’s last major recording project was an excellent album of standards for Liberty (included on the last disc of the Bear Box), in which her still excellent vocals are framed by sympathetic arrangements by Russ Garcia, in ensembles that vary from octet to full big band. Lutcher’s 1956 album, titled Our New Nellie, doesn’t include any of her trademark novelties, blues, or rhythm songs, but she completely transforms the twelve standards into Lutcher material with her zesty rhythmic style. Garcia clearly was a fan, and he made the brass and reed orchestrations bounce right along with her. From the mambo treatment of “Ole Buttermilk Sky” to the distinctive Garcia trombones (not to mention Red Norvo’s vibraphone) on “Blue Skies,” this is not a fading former hit maker of the previous decade enjoying a last hurrah. Rather, this is a formidable artist, a quintessential pianist-singer at the very peak of her powers.
The last few tracks on the Bear set are, though not bad, distinctly anticlimactic: There’s a session for Imperial in which she remade “Hurry on Down” and “He’s a Real Gone Guy,” by now singing them so fast that they move like a silent movie projected at an exaggeratedly fast speed. There’s a dreary ballad called “If Your Face Was as Beautiful as Your Soul,” but, in compensation, also a explosive original welltitled “I’ll Never Get Tired.” On songs like this, Lutcher is a veritable virtuoso of energy and rhythm. She never gets tired—she’s like a double shot of espresso in swingtime—and neither does her music.
Lutcher’s last session was a quartet of titles for a record label that her drummer, Lee Young, was trying to start in 1963; one is a dewaltzed retread of Irving Berlin’s “Reaching for the Moon” in the teeny-bop manner of Bobby Darin’s “Nature Boy.” They’re very professional, but Lutcher herself disavowed them. Her chart-topping days were long behind her, but she was never down and out. She continued to work, and was elected to office with the Los Angeles local of the American Federation of Musicians. She also owned and operated an apartment building on South Van Ness Avenue.
In 1973 and 1980 she played the Cookery on University Place in New York. On the latter occasion, like Cleo Brown, she was profiled by Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker, and made an appearance on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland. She actually lived long enough to see her music enjoy a brief vogue again in England in the nineties, at which time her duet with Nat King Cole, “For You, My Love,” was reissued as a CD single. She was also alive to enjoy the Bear Family box, Nellie Lutcher and Her Rhythm. She died in June 2007, a few months short of her ninety-fifth birthday. Even in death, Nellie Lutcher remains a real gone gal with a fine brown frame.
If you had never experienced the music of Rose Murphy, you would have been completely mystified when you heard Ella Fitzgerald, at any number of concerts in the mid-fifties (the famous 1958 Ella in Rome set is one), go into what might seem like a very strange detour in the middle of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.” After the opening chorus, the First Lady of Song starts making mysterious noises, chirping the way a butterfly might if it could sing, twitting about on the nonsense phrase “chee chee.” If Fitzgerald fans were puzzled by this in 1958, their kids must have been flabbergasted in 1962 when they heard Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons do “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.” Here, too, the lead singer intones the Jimmy McHugh melody in a voice even more stratospherically high (and sexually androgynous) than usual, while he dwells on that mysterious phrase “chee chee.” Even while Valli is chee-chee-ing in the foreground, the rest of the group (presumably the other three Seasons) repeats the phrase over and over, as if it were some spiritual mantra or magical incantation. Like Fitzgerald, Valli here produces high-pitched, nonverbal noises that apparently originated in the animal kingdom, like hummingbirds and purring kittens.
Fitzgerald and Valli are both, of course, affectionately imitating that famous Femme Follower of Fats, Rose Murphy, who was billed as “the Chee Chee Girl” and recorded an album called Not Cha-Cha but Chi-Chi (spelled slightly differently, I will admit, but Murphy was “chee chee” long before it was chi-chi). As was also true of Nellie Lutcher, however, Murphy’s use of sound effects isn’t as remarkable as her comic-rhythmic timing. Recorded in November 1947 at one of her first sessions, Murphy’s arrangement of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” is distinguished by her brilliant use of stop time breaks, a jazz device derived from the blues. Like Waller and Cole, she knows that the system of tension and release in music is a parallel to the comedy ideal of setup and punch line. She sets up the laugh, “I can’t give you anything but love …,” and then, when we expect to hear her say “baby” in the lyric as Dorothy Fields wrote it twenty years earlier, she throws us off by chanting “chee chee” instead. Murphy heightens the drama (and thereby the comedy) by extending the pause before going into the last note of key lines, and throughout defies our expectations. Instead of the word we expect, she pauses and throws in a “chee chee,” a hummingbird hum, a descending scatty trill, or possibly a snatch of the written lyrics to an entirely different melody.
Lee, Lutcher, and Murphy had progressively higher voices: Lee sang in a deep contralto that made her a blues-singing, Kansas City counterpart to Tallulah Bankhead, Lutcher was somewhere in the middle, but Murphy was up there in realms ornithological, higher than Cleo Brown or possibly even Blossom Dearie. She doesn’t have a wide vocal range in terms of her actual chops; possibly, she developed her unique vocabulary of sound effects as a way of compensating for her comparatively narrow range.
Rose Murphy was born in Xenia, Ohio, two years before Una Mae Carlisle. Like Lee and Lutcher, she didn’t begin recording until she was already in her mid-thirties. According to historian Wolfram Knauer, Murphy’s first noteworthy gig was on New York’s Fifty-second Street when she alternated with Count Basie at the Famous Door around 1938. Later, she was part of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s troupe, which brought her to the West Coast during the war years. She made regular appearances on the AFRS Jubilee, which was the number-one program for black soldiers and black talent; at least one track from the program (an early “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love”) has found its way onto a commercial CD.
By 1944, Murphy was being mentioned as a possible headliner at the Blue Angel, the famed cabaret room, back in New York. In Los Angeles, however, she did something neither Brown, Lee, nor Lutcher ever did—she appeared in a major Hollywood movie musical. This was the 1945 Twentieth Century Fox George White’s Scandals, alongside Joan Davis, Jack Haley, organ star Ethel Smith, and Gene Krupa and His Orchestra (plus, as Art Fern would say, “Scratch the Wonder Crab”). She played a maid (like virtually every other black actress in every movie ever made before 1950) but got to sing “Wishing (Will Make It So).”
In 1947, she finally began recording. As the year was drawing to a close, she laid down eighteen titles for Majestic, an independent concern that was trying to become a major label. (Many of these tracks were subsequently reissued by Mercury, a start-up label that, unlike Majestic, did graduate to conglomerate status.) Unfortunately, Murphy only seems to have commenced her contract with Majestic in November, which meant that she had only two months before the AFM curtailed all recording activity in January 1948; her entire association with the label lasted for only these eighteen songs. They were clearly made in a rush; her first recording of “Little Coquette,” in fact, sounds as if she’s accidentally mixed up the lyrics here and there, rather than deliberately playing with the song as she usually did. Apparently there just wasn’t time for another take.
As with Lutcher’s Capitol sessions, Murphy’s 1947 recordings offer a congenial balance of new songs and standards. Her overall approach is to get everything going with a buoyant, danceable tempo, spicing up the tunes old and new with chee chee’s and other sound effects. These are the same kind of musical devices that instrumentalists use to embellish a melody; at the end of her concluding piano part on “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” she decorates the McHugh tune with a tinkling glissando, yet she’s been doing the same thing all along with her voice. “Sweet Georgia Brown” is closer to a piano feature with vocal interjections: She begins with a boogie-woogie vamp intro, then launches the melody about thirty-five seconds in, singing only at the end of every A section on the words “Georgia Brown.” On “Cecilia,” she does the opposite, singing everything but the girl’s name, substituting a few seconds of hissing sibilance instead.
Like Waller, she deflates many a sentimental old song, like the potentially sappy “A Shanty in Old Shanty Town,” and even more so the archetypal torch song “Jim,” making a mockery of this turgid tale of a neglectful lover who fails to bring her pretty flowers or cheer her lonely hours. Possibly the funniest is “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” which reprises the jivey update recorded earlier by the Cats and the Fiddle. When she’s not using sound effects, sometimes there are distinctly Wallerian vocal interjections, as when she offers up “Oh yes they are” in the middle of “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” and in Waller’s own “Honeysuckle Rose” she can’t help spontaneously laughing, and her chortles and giggles also become part of the music. On “Pennies from Heaven,” her descending treble notes, both on voice and piano, have a distinctly penny-from-heaven quality to them.
Murphy’s standards are marvelously listenable, even though they’re all in the same bouncy foxtrot. On new songs, she’s more likely to vary the tempo. Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the contemporary numbers she recorded allow her to accommodate her vocal shtick: On “Mm-mm Good,” better known as the Campbell’s Soup jingle, the humming is part of the song as written; “Midnight on the Trail,” Murphy’s cowboy counterpart to Lutcher’s “Cool Water,” has her imitating a horse’s hoofbeats (at least I think so; the quality of the recording and the reissue are so murky that it’s hard to say for sure). “A Little Bird Told Me” is a welcome opportunity for aviary chee chee’s, while “Busy Line” finds her making like a telephone busy signal. The playful lyric to the 1932 “Is I in Love? I Is” allows her to play with the words as if they were sound effects or nonsense syllables.
The latter three tunes were recorded as part of Murphy’s contract with RCA Victor, which began at the conclusion of the 1948 ban (December) and lasted for seventeen tracks, recorded up through July 1949. The great boon of the RCA sessions is that the recording quality is considerably better than Majestic’s, and there’s also a brilliant-sounding reissue of the seventeen tracks (including several alternate takes and previously unissued items) on French RCA, titled Rose Murphy: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings. Other than improving the acoustics, RCA, commendably, didn’t mess with the Murphy mixture. There are more standards in this batch, including a new take on “Honeysuckle Rose” and an equally ebullient “Rosetta.” The new songs are also right up her alley, especially “Girls Were Meant to Take Care of Boys,” which suits her kewpie-doll demeanor more than it did Billie Holiday, “You, Wonderful You” (not the song of the following year from Summer Stock but a goodie just the same), and “Not Tonight.” The RCA sessions also include “Hey! Mama (He’s Trying to Kiss Me),” which, like most of Murphy’s best work, makes it impossible to imagine anyone listening to it without cracking a heavy-duty ear-to-ear smile.
Murphy next did a batch of dates for Decca in the early fifties, including a particularly zippy “Believe It Beloved” that honors Waller’s memory, and more twenties tunes, like “Button Up Your Overcoat.” On “I Wanna Be Loved by You” she effects a compromise between her chee chee’s and the song’s famous “boop-oop-a-doop” by cooing “chee-boop, chee-boop.” Several of the Deccas seem deliberately aimed at children, like “Peek-a-Boo” and “The Little Red Monkey.” On Vincent Youmans’s “Time on My Hands” she eschews all the lyrics to simply repeat the title line, make tic-toc noises and cuckoo clock calls, and imitate a chiming timepiece on the piano. At one point, she interjects the catchphrase “Time marches on!” and follows it with an approximation of soldiers marching: “Left, right!”
In 1957, Murphy cut an album for Verve, with the witty title of Not Cha-Cha but Chi-Chi, and began it with her third recording of “Honeysuckle Rose.” The presence of alto saxophonist Willie Smith added much to the proceedings; Murphy was an accomplished enough jazz pianist to fully complement him, and, like Nat Cole’s After Midnight (which Smith had played on a few months earlier) Not Cha-Cha can be enjoyed as a swing combo album with sympathetic vocals; in fact, several tunes, including the recent show tune “Mr. Wonderful,” are done entirely as instrumentals. Not every song is in the same relentless tempo; in fact, “I Ain’t Got Nobody” is positively relaxed, if not exactly sad and lonely. The track labeled “By the Waters of Minnetonka” turns out to be a medley of Native American love calls, starting with “Pale Moon” and transitioning into “Minnetonka,” in which Murphy uses her chirping to depict the ululations of wild Indians. There’s not a lot of variety to Murphy’s work overall, but this package goes down very smoothly. With the welcome contributions of Willie Smith, Not Cha-Cha is an adorable album all the way through.
Tom Lord’s Jazz Discography reports that Murphy also did some “rock and roll” records for a label called Regina. There was one further album in the “classic” period, an elusive LP titled Jazz, Joy, and Happiness, which, apparently, was produced in New York by an outfit called Big A’s and then reissued on United Artists (it features star bassist Slam Stewart, trumpeter Charlie Shavers, and multireed player Seldon Powell). Lastly, there are two elder states-woman releases from the later part of her career, Mighty like a Rose (1980), in which she’s accompanied by another star bassist, Major Holley, and Live in Concert (1982), taped in performance at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
The 1980 set, recorded in Nice and released on the French label Black & Blue, is a set of duos by Murphy and Holley. Murphy is up to her by now old tricks, the chee chee’s and other vocal effects, but at sixty-five she’s mellowed considerably, and is much less intense than on her vintage 78s. Those who thought her forties and fifties work too frantic would probably enjoy this album a lot more: She’s still a fine singer and a superb pianist (particularly on a pair of instrumentals, “Caravan” and Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz”). She reprises a few old favorites, among them “Busy Line” and “Time on My Hands,” which are now considerably less anxious, even though time still marches on. There’s also a new “Summertime,” in a very modern jazz-waltz tempo; before Murphy starts singing, you might assume the pianist was a disciple of Dave Brubeck’s. Her solo after the vocal is equally contemporary; again, you couldn’t tell it was Murphy except for the giggling and foot stamping.
Rose Murphy worked off and on throughout the eighties (I heard her and met her at an appearance at New York’s Duke Ellington Society), before she died in 1989. Her career was comparatively small no one can say she was overrecorded—but she certainly is one of the most distinctive, not to mention delightful, performers in popular music. In fact, if delight-fulness is your dish, you’d be hard pressed to name anyone who does it better. Here it is. Eat up.
It might be a stretch to call Hadda Brooks a disciple of Fats Waller’s. Even though she sings with lots of tonal color, compared to Nellie Lutcher and Rose Murphy her singing is positively straightforward, and she doesn’t kid the lyrics or offer verbal encouragement to her sidemen. Chronologically, Brooks is closer to the generation of Nat King Cole, but on closer inspection, the male pianist-singer she has the most in common with is Charles Brown. Her voice is somewhat similar to his and she also shares something of his distinctive intonation, particularly on blues. Unlike Brown, however, our Miss Brooks doesn’t always sound like a blues singer every time out.
She could be described as a chick chum of Charles Brown (rather than a female follower of Fats), but she also sounds like a relative of more traditional (pre-R&B) blues singers like Lil Green and Memphis Minnie. Note that we’re talking the “real” country blues here, not the “classic,” or more cosmopolitan, blues of Bessie Smith and the Empress’s many subjects. Where Minnie played guitar, Brooks played piano, and that immediately gave her a more urban, cosmopolitan image than the guitarists, who were associated with the traditional blues. In the forties, a pianist was apparently more likely to attract a mainstream audience than a guitarist. (Times, as they say, have changed.) Unlike Charles Brown, Memphis Minnie, or Lil Green, Brooks sang at least as many standards as she did blues.
The sound of Hadda Brooks’s music seems somewhat incongruous in the context of her biography. (The best I’ve read, incidentally, is the extensive annotation by Jim Dawson that accompanies the Virgin CD That’s My Desire, a compilation of her Modern Records singles; both the reissue and the notes are recommended.) Like Lee, Lutcher, and Murphy, Brooks made most of her record dates in Los Angeles, but unlike those slightly older ladies, she actually was born and raised there. Born Hattie Hapgood, she was a scion of what once was called, somewhat condescendingly, the black bourgeoisie. Her grandfather owned land, her father was a deputy sheriff, her mother was a doctor. How many black female doctors could there have been in California in 1916, the year Hattie Hapgood was born? Like Lutcher, she studied music with a very formal and proper lady professor, an Italian named Mrs. Bruni, and began playing piano not because she had eyes for a career in music, but simply because it was an acceptable course of study for refined young ladies. Unlike Lutcher and Lee, who were immersed in jazz and blues from an early age, Hapgood was only allowed to listen to concert music on her radio and phonograph. “I learned the classics, that’s all,” she told Dawson. “I’d play popular pieces like ‘Sophisticated Lady’ and ‘Body and Soul’ but then I’d hide the sheet music when Mrs. Bruni came by on Saturdays.”
Hapgood attended Northwestern University, near Chicago, and Chapman College, in Los Angeles. After graduating, instead of doing something with her piano training she married a prominent basketball player named Earl “Shug” Morrison (listed in various bios as having played with either the Broadway Clowns or the Harlem Globetrotters). They were only married for a year when, tragically, Morrison died of pneumonia. Not sure what to do next, she filled her days by working as an accompanist for dancers at the Willie Covan Dance Studio. Since her forte was classical piano, she had the bright although not altogether original idea of working up swing treatments of well-known concert pieces.
The story goes that while jamming on Franz von Suppé’s Poet and Peasant Overture, she happened to be overheard by one Jules Bihari, a young man (of Jewish-Hungarian descent) determined to make it in the music industry, who was at that time in the jukebox business. He had money in his pocket and was trying to think of something novel that he could use to start a record company with, and thought that classically inspired boogie-woogie was precisely what he was looking for. In the forties, boogie-woogie was regarded as the bottom of the black music food chain—sort of the way rap is today—looked down on by the longhair music community and even by serious jazz pianists like Art Tatum. When the young Oscar Peterson was importuned to record a pair of boogie-woogies, he regarded it as beneath him; Fats Waller himself denounced boogie-woogie as “two handfuls of nothing.”
Around 1940, a black female pianist named Hazel Scott began to build a career around the idea of jazzing up the classics—in fact, that was virtually her entire act. Scott (1920–1981) was extremely popular at the time, and she and the rather revolutionary nightclub Cafe Society essentially put each other on the map. We’re not covering Scott in any detail, not only because she wasn’t a singer (though she sang on a few of her recordings) but because she seems less important musically than she was culturally and politically, as the darling of Cafe Society and the celebrity wife of the most accomplished African American politician of his day, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. One of her final recordings was a date for bassist (and producer) Charles Mingus’s Debut label, but Hazel Scott (unlike Cleo Brown, for instance) was rarely cited as a major influence as a musician, and even less so as a singer.
Scott could be viewed, however, as a direct predecessor to Hadda Brooks, although her moment had pretty much passed at the point when Brooks and Bihari began to build her career and his new label around the idea of boogie-woogie-ing the classics. Brooks launched Bihari’s label, Modern Records, with a sizable hit in the instrumental “Swingin’ the Boogie,” recorded in April 1945, and followed it with a series of classical boogies: “Schubert’s Serenade in Boogie,” “Chopin’s Polonaise Boogie,” and “Grieg’s Concerto Boogie in A Minor.” Like Charles Brown, she also recorded a two-sided treatment of Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto. She was thoroughly versed in the classical side of the equation, and only taught herself to play boogie by studying recordings by Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, and other masters of the form. By this time, Brooks and Bihari were a team—they successfully launched Modern Records together, and they were romantically linked as well; she later called him the love of her life, and she never would marry again.
A year and a half or so and many boogies into her recording career—by which time she was already known as the “Queen of the Boogie”—Brooks began singing, at the encouragement of bandleader Charlie Barnet. As she told her later manager Alan Eichler, the two were sharing a bill at L.A.’s Million Dollar Theatre. She did her usual set of woogies-boogie, which went over well, and so the crowd demanded an encore. Barnet suggested that rather than the “monotony of yet another boogie,” she should try singing. “I can’t sing!” she protested. “Fake it!” the savvy saxophonist insisted.
The Modern discography is more than a little bit muddled, to put it mildly, but Brooks’s first recorded vocals include Henry Nemo’s “Don’t Take Your Love from Me” and “That’s My Desire” by Helmy Kresa (a Hungarian songwriter best known as Irving Berlin’s assistant), both of which she sang with distinctly Charles Brown–like cadences. Brooks apparently felt that to record boogie-woogies for money was one thing, but if she was forced to sing, it was going to be the music she loved, what blues historians call “supper club ballads” but what most of us call the Great American Songbook. These songs were much nearer to her heart than either Grieg or the blues.
Virtually all the popular songs Brooks recorded on Modern were older tunes that she obviously had loved for years; among them were “Bewildered” and “Trust in Me,” two thirties songs revived and established as soul ballads by Billy Eckstine, “Say It with a Kiss,” which she’d learned from either Maxine Sullivan or Billie Holiday, and “It All Depends on You.” Her commercial instincts were justified when “That’s My Desire” (backed with “Humoresque Boogie”) turned out to be her biggest hit: She had actually heard this 1931 song performed by Frankie Laine (who had recorded several vocals backed by Charles Brown), but she recorded her version and released it slightly ahead of Laine’s. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” was another thirties song that was successfully revived after the war, and Brooks’s treatment is much slower, more intimate, and more contemplative—though not any less optimistic and winning—than the hard-swinging hit instrumental treatment by Les Brown and His Band of Renown.
Between the instrumental boogies and the vocal blues and boogies, Brooks recorded at least seventy-five to eighty titles for Modern between 1945 and 1950; in all, it’s an impressive body of work. (While That’s My Desire is an excellent compendium of highlights, it’s hard to believe that there’s no complete set of her Modern recordings, a perfect project for Classics or Document Records.) There also were several blues-inflected ballads in the mix, including Bill Broonzy’s “Keep Your Hand on Your Heart” and “When a Woman Cries,” as well as a sultry number called “Honey, Honey, Honey.” According to Brooks, Bihari—as a ploy to increase sales—circulated the story that the lyrics to “Honey, Honey, Honey” were excessively suggestive. Most of the love songs she recorded were already standards, although it’s hard to ascertain how old Johnny Mercer’s 1944 “Dream” was when she recorded it, since the Modern sessions have not been accurately dated. She apparently liked “Don’t Take Your Love from Me” so much that she did at least two other songs by Nemo, “Tough on My Heart” and “Out of the Blue.” She sings all of these in an appealing, tart-edged voice that proclaims her a cousin, at least, of both Dinah Washington and Carmen McRae.
The most interesting novelty on That’s My Desire is something called “Tootsie Timesie.” Brooks told Dawson that it was written by a young female fan who came to her house and presented it to her. She described it as a variant on “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” and the bridges on both songs are clearly based on “I Got Rhythm.” The homage to the King Cole Trio’s comedy songs is obvious, and the delicatessen-driven lyrics are similar to Cole’s “Solid Potato Salad.” Yet the bass clef melody, the jagged rhythmic accents, and, come to think of it, even the title sound exactly like the writing of Thelonious Monk. Go figure.
More than the other singer-pianists, Brooks had looks. When Hollywood offered her the opportunity to work in pictures, she snatched it, appearing in a couple of short subjects and then graduating to cameos in features: Out of the Blue (1947), with George Brent and Turhan Bey, and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), with Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas (and Spike the Wonder Mule). Her most conspicuous role in her most prominent film was In a Lonely Place (1950), in which she played and sang a beautiful, restrained chorus of Ray Noble’s “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You” while Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame looked on with great interest. Next time it shows up on cable, set your TiVos to “sultry.”
By 1950, Brooks had helped to make Modern Records a player in the newly christened R&B market; the Bihari brothers, Joe and Jules, would eventually introduce B. B. King, Jesse Belvin, and both Elmore James and Etta James, among many others. But Brooks and Jules Bihari parted company in that year, both personally and professionally. She was by now popular enough to be upgraded from a “race”-based independent label to the black music subsidiary of a major. After a few rare sides for London Records, she began a one-year relationship with Okeh, the black music division of Columbia.
The sixteen sides Brooks cut for Okeh in 1952 (all included on the CD Jump Back Honey: The Complete Okeh Sessions) are an interesting if mixed bag, the best known of which is the title song. This original composition by Brooks, while not a major hit for her, nonetheless became one of the signature works of the transition into rock ’n’ roll in that it was widely covered by all sorts of white singers and big bands, from Vaughn Monroe to Jimmy Dorsey (not to mention Ella Mae Morse and, later, Rufus Thomas) and even the two ultra-Caucasian stars of TV’s Your Hit Parade, Snooky Lanson and Dorothy Collins. It’s one of those irresistibly bouncy, nonsensical riffs that frequently crossed over in that era, rather like “Hambone,” “Tweedle-Dee-Dee,” and “Sh-Boom.”
The Okeh batch has a couple of oddities, like Edith Piaf’s Parisian passion piece “If You Love Me” done as a mostly spoken monologue (backed by a small orchestra conducted by future arranging star Don Costa), and a very straight reading of “I Went to Your Wedding,” Patti Page’s lamentably lachrymose hit. Tellingly, all of the Okeh sides are vocals; the boogie instrumental series was finished before she could get around to “Bartók Boogie”
On the plus side, there’s an improved remake of “Trust in Me,” as well as a number of sides that were equal parts blues and torch song, while Charles Singleton’s “All Night Long” likewise manages to be both romantic and erotic. In “I Don’t Mind” the message is that the singer almost enjoys suffering for her man, whereas in “You Let My Love Get Cold” she retaliates with a message more like “Make me suffer, will you?”
The two most satisfying Okehs are a pair of standard ballads by Irving Berlin, songs I imagine Brooks learned as a little girl, seated at the Steinway, while Mrs. Bruni was looking the other way. “Remember” is, as always (and, as “Always”), a lovely, touching song, which Brooks keeps from getting sentimental by doing it slightly faster than you’d expect—and in 4/4 rather than waltz time. “When I Leave the World Behind” is a total surprise; usually done as a grandiose Jolsonesque last will and testament set to music, Brooks’s interpretation is admirably restrained and underplayed—and right on the money. Overall, it’s one of the most subtle—and therefore most moving—treatments ever of this rarely revived Berlin beauty.
The sixteen songs for Okeh were apparently the end of Brooks’s recording career. (There were some LPs released on Crown, a bargain label, but it’s hard to tell if any of these contain original material or, more likely, are strictly reissues of the Modern 78s.) For the rest of the fifties, Brooks toured Europe and worked intermittently on television; according to one account, she was the first African American woman to host her own talk show, making her the Oprah of her day. For most of the sixties, she lived and worked in Australia, then, she told Dawson, “when I came home, I retired.”
For roughly fifteen years Brooks kept out of sight, but then she came to the attention of Richard Lamparski, a journalist who made a career out of “rescuing” showbiz personalities who had been relegated to the far corners of obscurity. After Lamparski featured her in one of his Whatever Happened To … books, he put her in touch with Alan Eichler, a pop music buff and agent who likewise made a specialty of resurrecting the careers of veteran divas who had fallen through the cracks.
Eichler helped Brooks orchestrate a whole new career; starting roughly in 1986, the year she turned seventy, and continuing for roughly ten years, Brooks played major rooms all over the world, from the Fairmont in San Francisco to Michael’s Pub and the Oak Room at the Hotel Algonquin in New York. She was beloved of both the lounge music movement and the swing-dance craze, not to mention being rightfully recognized as a pioneer of rhythm and blues. Her career at this point was like that of the similarly neglected Little Jimmy Scott in that she also briefly became the cause du jour of hip celebrities. Retro rockabilly star Deke Dickerson brought her in to do a duet with him on “You’re My Cadillac,” accompaned by his band, the Ecco-Fonics, on his album More Million Sellers. Johnny Depp hired her to sing in the Viper Room, a club he owned on the Sunset Strip (Depp hosted her eightieth birthday at the club, and Jack Nicholson and Uma Thurman were in attendance). Sean Penn gave her a singing and acting cameo in his 1995 film The Crossing Guard.
Miss Brooks had pretty much skipped over the entire LP era, but went straight from 78s in 1952 to a pair of newly recorded CDs in 1994 (Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere on DRG) and in 1995 (Time Was When on Virgin). Both of these later albums employ a King Cole–style rhythm section with guitarist Al Viola and bassist Eugene Wright, plus, as special guests, trumpeter Jack Sheldon on the first and cellist Richard Dodd on the second. On both, she obviously sounds like a seventy-five-year-old woman whose voice has been around the block more than a few times but one who has spent all those years perfecting the craft of delivering a lyric.
There are many remakes on the two albums, including a third recording of “Trust in Me” and an update of “Don’t You Think I Ought to Know?” The prize on Time Was When is the title song, in a slightly slower and more poignant treatment than the recording from forty-plus years earlier, as it took all the intervening years for her to fully realize exactly what time was and is; when she sang it live in a club and closed with the line “But I can remember when there was a time,” nobody was about to doubt her. Her reading of the Sinatra classic “I’m a Fool to Want You” shows that dark torch songs are her true forte, while “How Do You Speak to an Angel” bespeaks a knowledge and mastery of obscure show tunes. However, upon hearing “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” (associated with Bessie Smith and then Nina Simone), you would have to conclude that her true color was the basic blues.
Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere benefits from the exuberant presence of trumpeter Jack Sheldon, particularly on the brasscentric ballad “Man with the Horn” as well as Brooks’s lightly rocking “Ol’ Man River.” She renders the Hammerstein-Kern anthem with swing era–style jive accoutrements, including a contrapuntal riff and a fast tempo, but make no mistake: Her treatment is highly emotional, punctuated by interjections of laughter, and another very moving and personal statement about the passage of time. Sheldon also sings, deploying that marvelously scratchy voice we all know from School house Rock cartoons, joining her on “All of Me.”
To me, the masterpiece of the two later albums is “Don’t Go to Strangers,” a mainstream song long accepted into the realm of blue ballads. She sings it with just her own piano, slow and sentimental, but not too slow or too sentimental—making it highly personal but refusing to let it get maudlin. She sings with unmistakable love—romantic, maternal, whatever, it could be to a child or to a lover, it doesn’t matter. She’s been through it all, she’s an old hand—the lyric tells us this—but the words are almost immaterial; at best they merely reinforce what we hear in the sound of Brooks’s voice itself. She sings it with so much authority that from the very sound of her weather-beaten voice we realize that there’s next to nothing that she doesn’t know.
Hadda Brooks died in 2002, at the age of eighty-six. I saw her many times in the nineties; usually she was wonderful, and it’s good to have the two later albums to back up that recollection. Once, near the end, she was clearly crocked: She sang several songs more than once, and also repeated at least one anecdote. It didn’t matter.
On the Anytime album, she does “Heart of a Clown,” a ballad she obviously learned from Nellie Lutcher, who recorded it twice. Lutcher’s rendition is more than a bit artsy and heavy for her, and is hardly one of the more scintillating items in her catalogue. But Brooks puts it into more of a dance tempo, and makes it meaningful by keeping it light. She enjoyed a much bigger comeback and late-in-life career than Cleo Brown, Julia Lee, Nellie Lutcher, or Rose Murphy, and in salvaging this forgotten number from Lutcher’s songbook, Hadda Brooks was closing the book on a highly worthy but woefully neglected area of American music.