by John Szwed
But none of these new coon shouters could top Eva Tanguay, a French Canadian who made her way to stardom from 1905 to 1929 in whiteface or black with bawdy songs like “It’s All Been Done Before but Not the Way I Do It,” “Go as Far as You Like,” and the brassy, free-spirited “I Don’t Care”:
You see I’m sort of independent,
Of a clever race descendent,
My star is on the ascendant,
That’s why I don’t care.
She dressed in elaborate costumes, sometimes literally made of money, other times showing more flesh than had ever been seen on the respectable stage. Her dancing and singing were not the best, but both were done in an explosive style as she romped across the stage tossing out sexual innuendoes. Offstage, her behavior was unpredictable, and she always made sure that her fans knew everything she was doing, whether stabbing a rival with a hat pin, walking out on her own hit show, or being arrested for lewdness. Her private life became so thoroughly public that she was suspected of staging her personal relationships: She was briefly engaged to a popular female impersonator who appeared dressed as her bride, while she was attired as the groom; she had an affair with George Walker, the black stage partner of Bert Williams, the great early blackface singer and comedian; she wrote about her recklessness and trysts in the Hearst newspapers. In her first big New York musical she sang a coon song, “My Sambo,” that received such enormous response that when she starred in her next show, The Blonde in Black, the title was quickly changed to The Sambo Girl. It would be hard to overestimate Eva Tanguay’s influence. Mae West started out as a Tanguay imitator, and both Sophie Tucker and Ethel Waters borrowed freely from her.
What Tanguay established was that licentiousness and racial and sexual indiscretions could be forgiven in a performer’s private life if she somehow combined energetic and comedic sexuality while in blackface roles. In the process she also demonstrated a fundamental principle of minstrelization, a form of racial and cultural passing in which high-status minstrelizers felt free to temporarily mask as subordinates after learning only a minimal number of real (or imagined) cultural characteristics, never fearing being unmasked because they were performing exclusively for their own group. The subordinate, however, was required to have a physical self at least marginally similar to that of the dominant group, and in addition had to fully master the high-status group’s cultural characteristics to perform for them, though she or he was never free from the risk of being discredited. This was a principle that was so much a part of a society founded on racial inequality that Tanguay, like other white performers onstage, came to realize that it would be possible to minstrelize without blacking up.
“The real thing” was represented by Ma Rainey, who was billed as “the Mother of the Blues.” Rainey had worked her way up from early black variety shows like the Rabbit Foot Minstrels to forming her own traveling tent shows, which drew both blacks and whites. She was sometimes also billed as a coon shouter and a “Black Face Song and Dance Comedienne,” though she sang no coon songs and wore no black makeup. She dressed instead in costumes and jewelry that radiated wealth, dignity, and pride, and traveled with her own stage sets, a full troupe of dancers, and a choreographer. Her show was filled with comedy skits and eccentric dance acts, but she was unquestionably the main attraction, singing in a powerful voice that reached outside the tent even without a microphone. She flirted with men in the audience, but sang about the pleasures of women together without men. Her repertoire was primarily the blues, with only the occasional pop song. But there was another side of her performances that set her apart from the flamboyant white singers of the era, which Sterling Brown captured in his 1932 poem “Ma Rainey”: her ability to turn entertainment into a sacred event by the force of her songs alone. When she sang “Backwater Blues” (probably her account of the devastation and human tragedy caused by the Nashville, Tennessee, flood of Christmas Day 1926), the laughing and cheering of her audiences gave way to a silent collective prayer:
An’ den de folks, dey naturally bowed dey heads an’ cried
Bowed dey heavy heads, shet dey moufs up tight an’ cried.
She continued touring and recording until the late 1920s, when her kind of blues fell out of favor with urban African Americans, and she withdrew to where she had begun, in the backwoods of the South. But by then she had influenced any number of singers, including the young Bessie Smith, who spent time as part of her troupe.
• • • • •
Another characteristic singer of the period was the “red-hot mama”: physically formidable, tough, wise, holding no illusions about men. These women modeled themselves on white singers like Tanguay and African American blueswomen like Ma Rainey. Although the mamas themselves were typically not very old—most were only in their twenties—they acted in a mature manner, physically taking charge of the stage and the theater the instant the curtain went up. Their songs were didactic, mocking, threatening, and vengeful. They typically began by addressing the women in the audience, and then turned to the men, spelling out their intentions: They sought sexual freedom on their own terms, and no man would ever take advantage of them. Bessie Smith, like Ma Rainey, had some of these qualities, but black women were never given the title of red-hot mama, even though “hot” was a term most often used by black musicians and singers to describe some types of their music. Bessie was nonetheless clearly one of the key models for this kind of singing.
Sophie Tucker was the quintessential red-hot mama, even though she was born in Ukraine and had entered the United States with her family under an assumed Italian name, Abuza. She began her career in show business in blackface singing coon songs such as “That Lovin’ Two-Step Man” and “That Lovin’ Soul Kiss.” She was called by various names (including Ethel Tucker and Solo Tucker), billed under others (“The Southern Coon Singer,” “Best Coon Shouter in Captivity”), and in interviews offered differing accounts of her life, especially about where she got her Italian name, why she performed in blackface, and why she eventually abandoned blackface. At one point she, like others, began to expose her white skin by pulling back her gloves onstage, but then followed her glove striptease by announcing that she was Jewish, and not Southern. Finally, abandoning her makeup altogether, she entered the Jazz Age by billing herself as the “Queen of Jazzaration” or “The Queen of Jazz” and shifting to saucy songs that declared her independence. Though now performing as white, her repertoire openly echoed that of Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, including such numbers as “I Ain’t Takin’ Orders from No One” or “Mama Goes Where Papa Goes (Or Papa Don’t Go Out Tonight).”
There was yet another, smaller group of singers at the extreme opposite pole of other popular artists in the late 1920s and 1930s world of song. They were not considered part of a specific category, but they might be called flappers because they performed as very young, naive, coquettish girls, singing in childlike voices. Helen Kane was the most famous and successful of this group, especially after her recording of “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” with its “boop oop a doop” minimalist rhythmic scat line, became a big hit. It was her tiny voice, along with her hairstyling and stage movements, that appeared to be the source for the Fleischer Brothers’ Betty Boop movie cartoons. This style of singing might seem far removed from African American song, but when Kane sued Paramount Pictures over the Betty Boop films, it was revealed that she had likely taken her singing style from the young Cotton Club performer Esther Jones, also known by the stage name Baby Esther. Other black singers with high voices used similar childlike scat effects, such as Rose Murphy, best known as the “chi-chi” lady for one of her own scat interpolations.
• • • • •
Although in Lady Sings the Blues Holiday never mentions three other singers who were major forces in her first decade as a singer—Ethel Waters, Mildred Bailey, and Mabel Mercer—there is reason to believe that all three were important to her. She knew them all. Her mother had served as a
maid for both Waters and Bailey, not the best of ways for an aspiring performer to relate to world-famous singers. Waters was not known for her kindness to anyone, and once proclaimed that Billie sang as if her shoes were too tight. On another occasion she interrupted Holiday’s singing onstage to tell her that she had no right to sing a song that Waters also sang. John Hammond said that Mildred Bailey constantly complained to Billie about her mother’s sloppy housekeeping and cooking, in part because it was true, but he felt it was also because it was Bailey’s way of dealing with the fact that Billie was such a fine singer. Mabel Mercer, on the other hand, had a small cult following of the very rich and the very talented that Billie admired, but she recognized that Mabel kept a certain distance as a performer, a gentle hauteur that she could never manage. When she first went to see Mabel sing at the urging of her friend Thelma Carpenter, she remarked, “You know I can’t be a classy singer!”
• • • • •
Surely, no singer has ever had a career as far-reaching or as fully realized as Ethel Waters. She was born twenty years before Holiday, but their early lives had remarkable similarities. There was nothing in Waters’s miserable childhood that suggested greatness, but by means of talent, hard work, and fearlessness she made her way to the top as a blues, pop, and gospel singer, dancer, writer, and stage and film actress. Her successes form a long list of “first black woman to . . .” honors, and if many of these triumphs have been forgotten, it’s at least in part due to the fact that she did so much so well.
Her range as a singer was enormous. She excelled in several styles, and used them to challenge her competitors. Langston Hughes was so fascinated by her salty, near-blues “Go Back Where You Stayed Last Night” of 1925 that he urged his readers to become acquainted with her work, which was simultaneously more sophisticated than that of other songsters and far rougher than that of the refined blues singers who preceded her. When the blues began to fall out of fashion in urban areas, with black uplift newspaper writers arguing that they were vulgar and a drag on the race, Waters widened her song repertoire, but with a shrewd eye for fault lines and fissures. Noting that “My Man” was seen by white people as a blues, she realized that there was room to negotiate between the tastes of the two audiences. She introduced many songs that were immediately successful and are still well known, like “Stormy Weather,” “Black and Blue,” “Dinah,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and “Am I Blue?” Sophie Tucker once paid Waters to teach her about her singing style and choice of songs, since she, like Bessie Smith, was hoping to begin a new phase of her career with freshly minted pop tunes.
In addition to the clarity and breeziness of her singing, what set her apart from other singers of her times was the magnetism of her physical performance. She worked hard to act the blues, while most others merely sang. When she moved beyond blues to pop songs, she said she was surprised that she could act them, too. Her eyes engaged everyone in the audience; her smile was unusually warm but also persistently difficult to read (shy? teasing? coquettish?). Her arms were often held straight out from her body like a dancer’s, offering openness, but also making room for her shake dance, which engaged most of the parts of her body.
Though it would not be quite accurate to call Waters a crossover performer, by drawing on the work of the white red-hot mamas and merging it with a black aesthetic, Waters shaped the direction of popular music well into the next century, so much so that it’s difficult to find a black woman singer who came after her who didn’t show her influence. How could it be otherwise when she never flinched at crossing musical territories, experimented with changing tempos within a three-minute recording, mixed the words of one song with another, slipped comedy into unfunny songs, and made casual talk, scatting, and rapping all parts of her interpretations? At the same time, she could mock her competition with devastating imitations, or lovingly copy Louis Armstrong’s singing on “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.”
Though Holiday did not credit Waters by name, the fact that she recorded songs that Waters had already made famous, sometimes sounded like her (especially on Holiday’s first recording, “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law”), and borrowed from her songs when she composed her own blues (Holiday uses lines from Waters’s 1922 recording “Ethel Sings ’Em” in her “Fine and Mellow” and Waters’s 1924 “Cravin’ Blues” and 1925 “Down Home Blues” in her own “Billie’s Blues”) speaks for itself.
• • • • •
On a first hearing of Mildred Bailey, it might not be apparent to most listeners that she was considered an important singer, much less a jazz singer. Her voice is high and light, and she does not seem to offer any particular point of view. But she did improvise, had a clear and sure ability to communicate a song, and could sing the blues in a manner that white and many black people found more appealing than the heavier, more rural-inflected performers. Her sense of swing was secure and had a floating quality that made her fit in comfortably with swing musicians as a new era of jazz began.
Her mother was Native American, Coeur d’Alene, from eastern Washington, and Mildred had occasion to threaten to sue journalists who wrote that she was a Negro. Bailey rose to national fame by performing with the extremely popular Paul Whiteman Orchestra at the same time as Bing Crosby sang with that band, and he remarked at how much she had taught him about singing. Over the years many other singers, such as Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett, said much the same about what they had learned from her as a band singer.
• • • • •
Mabel Mercer was an Afro-British singer who reached the United States from Paris and Britain briefly in the late 1930s, and then returned to stay permanently after 1941. She was a singer who genuinely could be called a chanteuse. She sang lyrics with precise pronunciation, rolling her r’s like an old-school British stage singer, and delivered her songs conversationally, often sitting in a chair, seldom moving her hands. At the same time she discreetly broke some of the rules of singing by stressing the less important words in a phrase, bringing surprising emotions to lyrics, and allowing long, held notes to drop away at the end of phrases.
Mercer developed a way of looking at the audience without appearing to see it and yet somehow making it feel that she was personally singing to each person in it. For many she was an acquired taste, but she was worshiped by singers such as Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole, Mel Tormé, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Eileen Farrell, and Ethel Waters. Billie resisted going to hear her at first, but once she did, she almost missed her own next set at the club across the street because she didn’t want to leave. It was likely Mabel who introduced her to songs like “You’d Better Go Now” and to George Cory and Douglass Cross, songwriters who had written songs and arrangements for her and accompanied her on record. Billie recorded two of their best songs, “I’ll Look Around” and “Deep Song.”
And blues were only torch songs
Fashioned for impulsive ingénues
Leah Worth and Bobby Troup,
“The Meaning of the Blues”
• • • • •
When Billie performed on the first night that Café Society opened in late 1939, she began to put together a new repertoire, much of which would become part of her performances for the rest of her life. The message of these new songs and her manner of presenting them connected her with torch singing, a new style derived from a mixture of European and African American cabaret performance. Although many fans blamed the downtown venue for what they viewed as her abandonment of her jazz roots, Barney Josephson, the club’s owner, said she herself had asked to do these songs and assured him that was what she now wanted to sing.
Torch singing is scarcely more easily defined than jazz singing or blues singing, but it can at least be described as the ability of a singer (usually a woman) to tell a story through a song with emotional conviction. The pieces themselves were typically laments, songs of longing, romantic misfortune, of weariness with life, or even of the pleasures of pain; the words were sung sl
owly, softly, with confessional intimacy. Their performers revealed themselves as searching for an unobtainable love, perhaps even one free of sexual desire. Unlike the red-hot mamas, torch singers made no bold public proclamations, but instead interrogated their unbearable situation, their enslavement to an ideal of love.
Torch songs are descendants of French cabaret songs from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, which often dealt with the sorrows and sad lives of the lower classes, the people of the streets, and were sometimes called realist songs. They were ballads that told stories, or songs in which the singer introduced herself to the audience, sometimes in self-mockery. (Songs told from the point of view of a prostitute were very common, and could be poignant, whining, or camp.) There were also reflections on personal, social, or political topics, and songs of moods and feelings (such as “Autumn Leaves”). These songs were sung in bars or nightspots, spaces small enough to allow the singer to carry on a kind of part-spoken, part-sung conversation with members of the audience. Most French singers of these songs were older, with experiences that would lead an audience to believe that the singer was communicating directly from her life.
The singers of torch songs have been called many things: tragic victims, fallen angels, damaged divas, tortured sound-angels, suicide queens, wounded prostitutes, and ethereal sonic documentarians of our romantic dark sides. It was said that Holiday could turn anything—even “My Yiddishe Momme” or “Strange Fruit”—into a torch song, and it was songs such as these that her audiences would come to interpret as missing parts of her autobiography.
Yet she was called a blues singer for the rest of her life. Was this a mistake, a misunderstanding of blues songs? The names songs are given and the categories they are placed in are often notoriously arbitrary and have little bearing on how they differ from or are similar to other songs. Although “blues” in a song title did not necessarily make the piece a genuine blues, blues and pop songs do share a number of harmonic, rhythmic, and emotional similarities. They were both shaped and formalized at roughly the same time, the early part of the twentieth century. Both types of song do deal with the displeasures and disappointments of love, but they are the only subject of torch songs, while the blues can be concerned with everything from war and poverty to horse racing and the praise of automobiles.
