The Jazz Singers

Part I

When Sammy Davis saunters onto the stage of New York's Copacabana, snaps his fingers, kicks with the band and belts out a blues, he's providing the best possible proof that talent is never born in a vacuum. What Sammy sings and how he sings it – no matter how "commercial" his style may be dubbed by some – has its roots deep in the mainstream of jazz, back in time through literally thousands of singers who have wailed, moaned, chanted, grunted, shouted, scatted, hummed, warbled, rhapsodized, torched, larked, agonized, blasted, gurgled, whispered, crooned, smeared and riffed their way through six-odd decades of jazz in the U.S.

What is this thing called jazz singing? Stated simply, it is the employment of the voice as a jazz instrument in any of the many traditions established, for the most part, by the horn men and rhythm-section stalwarts of this syncopated music.

Jazz – whether we are referring to traditional New Orleans, Dixieland, Chicago Style, Rhythm and Blues, Boogie Woogie, Swing, Bop, Cool, Progressive, Hard Bop, Funk, Soul, Third Stream or you-name-it – is basically an urban phenomenon, but its roots were nurtured in the earthiest musical soil. There were firmly-founded European melodies and harmonies brought to America in (continued on page 42)Jazz singers(continued from page 39) the very beginnings of our history; West African concepts of rhythm and phrasing, borne to our shores by the first Negro slaves; and an almost limitless array of musical influences that were part of the lore of hundreds of ethnic groups that arrived in the U.S. during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. But jazz, as such, wasn't identifiable until the late 1800s, when Negroes began fusing the multiplicity of European and African flavors with their own view of life in the post-bellum South. Jazz was then, and still is, a music emphasizing rhythm and the percussive use of melody instruments. Its heart is improvisation: ad lib solos delving into and around the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic marrow of songs. Like many of the European classical compositions that predated it, jazz has made extensive use of them-and-variation. From Africa – south of the Sahara – jazz seized the call-and-response pattern, preserved in today's fervent gospel music and big-band riffing. A fusion of many taproots, it grew just as America grew, acquiring sophistication as the nation progressed from a simple society to a complex culture. Some myopic diggers of jazz have refused to admit that there has been much growth at all and stoutly maintain that only "traditionalists" can be labeled as purveyors of the true jazz – whatever that is. But this view makes about as much sense as the claim that jazz – instrumental or vocal – never got out of Storyville.

Get out it did. Initially, jazz and jazz singing came aborning in the sounds of crudely played instruments and protesting Negro voices rising out of the South to proclaim what many hoped would be a new life. From the African chant, the slave song, the work song, the field shout, the prison dirge, the folk ballad, the minstrel refrain, the street cry – from all of these and more – singers like Sammy Davis have derived their traditions, their styles and much of their repertoires. Along a Mississippi levee in the 1890s came the sound:

Oh, rock me Julie, rock me.

Rock me slow and easy,

Rock me like a baby.

It was heard in Auburn, Alabama, in Memphis, in St. Louis. On rotting porches, in cabins of discarded boards, the cry of the blues was born, and the singers who sang the blues expressed this heritage – sometimes happy, mostly sad.

By 1910, the word blues was in wide use, and the first of them – Hart Wand's Dallas Blues – was published just two years later. Ironically, Wand was a well-off white violinist from Oklahoma City; he heard the tune whistled by a Negro porter in his father's drugstore and transcribed it. The first printing was gobbled up in a week (mostly by whites who played it atrociously on the piano in the parlor), and a second went almost as rapidly. The piece is still played and sung today. A few months after Wand's work came out, W. C. Handy published Memphis Blues (structurally not a true blues; it was originally written as a 1909 political campaign song).

A few of the early, and some of the best, blues shouters managed to record; among them were Ma Rainey and Blind Lemon Jefferson. According to jazzologist Charles Edward Smith, "Ma Rainey was not a big woman, but she was always on the heavy side, and toward the end of her career she tended toward inelegant obesity. She flirted with youth like a hag inexpertly applying rouge. Gold caps on her teeth lent her a garish smile, and her queenly flaunting was like that of a bad actress assuming a role to which she had no right. They snickered behind her back, and she heard the snickers and turned venomously on her detractors." Ma was a soulful blues singer and a tough broad, but one associate remembered her as having "warm eyes and a heart as big as a house." New Orleans drummer Zutty Singleton heard her in a tent show in 1914 and recalls her crying a blues with the words "Look what a hole I'm in." As she sang, the stage collapsed.

Born Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett, Ma let out her first wail in Columbus, Georgia, in 1886; she died fifty-three years later in the same city. Her husband, William Rainey, was a member of a minstrel troupe and Ma joined him on the Negro vaudeville circuit. In 1923, she made her first record, backed by Lovie Austin's group, which included the legendary trumpeter Tommy Ladnier. (Later, Louis Armstrong was among the horn men who accompanied her.) By 1929, she had made about fifty records for the Paramount label and continued to tour the hinterlands until the public lost interest in blues singers and forced her to retire. According to the French critic Hugues Panassié, "Next to Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey is the greatest blues singer who ever recorded. Her ample, extremely deep and beautiful contralto was ideal for the blues, which she sang with a majestic, imposing accent and an almost religious gravity." Such a sound is apparent on several currently available LP reissues of Ma's early sides – Classic Blues and Broken-Hearted Blues (Riverside), which contain such moving messages as Honey, Where Have You Been So Long and Lawd, Send Me a Man.

It is impossible to trace back to the exact birth of the blues, despite numerous songs and motion pictures that have attempted to do so. Born in a simple form – basically twelve bars divided into three sections of four bars each – blues were transported by troubadours who wandered with their guitars from town to town in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, singing for coins on street corners. Among these pioneers – and typical of the early itinerant blues singers – was Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Blind Lemon (his name was Lemon; he was born blind) was from Couchman, Texas, a run-down farming area. Born around 1897, he began collecting blues as a boy; his education in the streets and brothels of Dallas gave him a rousing repertoire. Like other blues wanderers of his ilk, Blind Lemon traveled as far as Tennessee and Alabama. In the Twenties, he arrived in Chicago to live and record until his death in 1930. His music (available on several Riverside LPs) was excitingly rough and sinewy, and his voice – harshly nasal – was primitive and compelling. He was but one of many jazz minstrels in the early 1900s. There were others – just names to some people, but legends to others – Blind Blake, Ida Cox, Lonnie Johnson, Leadbelly, Rabbit Brown, Sleepy John Estes, Willie McTell, Furry Lewis, Leroy Carr, Barbecue Bob, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Lightning Hopkins, and many, many more. Some were country blues singers who chanted of the fields and the rural life in the Southland and Midwest; others were urban blues singers who plied their more sophisticated songs in the saloons and red-light districts of metropolitan centers.

Many of them gathered in Chicago. Big Bill Broonzy, who was among them, remembered that "People started to give parties and some Saturday nights they would make enough money to pay the rent, so they started to call them 'houserent parties,' because they sold chicken, pig feet, home brew, chittlins, moonshine whiskey. The musicians didn't have to buy nothing and would get a chance to meet some nice-looking women and girls, too." Many urban blues singers made their way to these parties, to exchange talk and tunes, to sip refreshments and to take stock of their own plight:

They say if you's white, you's all right;

If you's brown, stick-around.

But as you're black;

Mmm, Mmm, Brother, git back, git back, git back.

So the blues were sung, and were soon to have an effect on the popular music of the country. In New York, the minions of Tin Pan Alley spotted salable elements in the early jazz, and they moved it, via sheet music and records, to the far reaches of America. One of the most illustrious lights in the entire history of (continued on page 44)Jazz singers(continued from page 42) jazz singing – Bessie Smith – played a key role in this flow of early jazz into the mainstream of American popular music.

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1900, Bessie became Ma Rainey's prize pupil, joining Ma's Rabbit Foot Minstrels and heeding her instructions. According to George Avakian, "Bessie was a large, handsome woman; she was five feet nine inches tall, and though she weighed 210 pounds in her prime, almost all of it was solid bone and muscle. Her appetites were as prodigious as the strength of her voice and body. She drank to excess in her youth and increased her capacity as she rose to fame. Hers was a quick cycle. From the obscurity of cheap tent shows, carnivals and honky-tonks that preceded her first recording in 1923, she shot right up to the big time, was riding high during 1924-7, but by 1930 was just holding on, and none too successfully. At fault was a combination of changing public taste and her own excesses."

In September 1937, on the main road to Memphis, her car smashed into another; she died from loss of blood under circumstances still in doubt. But before Bessie sang her last chorus, she spread the gospel of jazz; in the Twenties, her records sold millions of copies and she was the highest-paid Negro entertainer in the country, earning $1500 a week.

Of her artistry, Avakian wrote, "Bessie Smith could do more with a greater variety of blues than any other singer who ever lived. She left behind 160 recordings. Each is a three-minute demonstration of why this great folk artist so richly deserved to be called The Empress of the Blues.

"A mistress of vocal inflection and an artist of impeccable taste, Bessie was also blessed with a huge, sweeping voice which combined strength and even harshness with an irresistible natural beauty. She could cut loose when she wanted to, but was also capable of the tenderest nuances. Every note she sang had in its interpretation the history and heritage of her people, even in her last creative years when she was trying to 'go commercial' and her texts strayed from the authenticity they once had. Her style and individuality always remained, no matter what the circumstances.

"Bessie's control of her voice was without parallel; a subtle accent in one syllable could convey the meaning of a line. Her sense of pitch was as dramatic as it was accurate. She could hit a note on the nose if she wanted to, but she could also dip, glide and 'bend' a note to express her feelings. In short, she combined technique with the finest elements of folk art."

Another critic wrote: "Bessie sang the blues to make a living; but she also sang the blues to communicate who she was, who she wanted to be, and why. And basically, she told the blues as a Negro who grew up in the South with Jim Crow; who moved through the North but couldn't shake Jim Crow; and who, as some stories have it, may have died because Jim Crow ran a hospital that didn't take in colored, even when they were bleeding to death.

"Her blues could be funny and boisterous and gentle and angry and bleak, but underneath all of them ran the raw bitterness of being a human being who had to think twice about which toilet she could use. You can't hear Bessie without hearing why Martin Luther King doesn't want to wait any more."

Many of her best records are preserved in the four-LP The Bessie Smith Story (Columbia); among them is a stunning Down Hearted Blues, her first recording, cut in the spring of 1923. When it was originally issued, several key distributors placed token orders, convinced it was nothing more than another blues. Once the public heard Bessie, however, sales began to spiral. By the end of 1923, more than two million of Bessie's records had been sold.

The record-shop stampedes caused by Bessie Smith brought millions into the jazz fold. Aiding her in the crusade were several namesakes: Mamie Smith (the first to record, in 1920), Laura Smith, Clara Smith and Trixie Smith – none related to Bessie – and a horde of other jazz singers, male and female.

Among the early giants was Louis Armstrong, a New Orleans-Chicago-and-all-points blues specialist whose trumpet and voice were to become paragons of jazz artistry. Armstrong introduced the first departures from the blues idiom. He was at home with blues, of course, but he often turned his jazz conception in other directions, and his Hot Five recording of Heebie Jeebies initiated the "scat" approach to singing, unintelligible, horn-like utterances that parallel the sound and phrasing of a musical instrument. Currently available on Volume One of the four-LP The Louis Armstrong Story (Columbia), Heebie Jeebies is a jazz vocal landmark. According to musicologist Avakian, who assembled the masters and data for this epochal set, there are several versions of exactly what happened at that Okeh session in 1926: "The late Richard M. Jones, recording director on the session, always claimed that Louis meant to sing the vocal twice through, but dropped the sheet music halfway and had to improvise monosyllables till he got straightened out. Kid Ory, trombonist with Armstrong's Hot Five, says that Louis had the lyrics memorized, but forgot them. Or at least pretended to, Ory adds with a grin." Whatever the truth may be, Satchmo made a key contribution to the history of jazz singing with the introduction of scat, or "vocalese."

In 1929, Louis moved solidly into the pop field for material, turning I Can't Give You Anything but Love into a jazz adventure of the first order. By 1930 the pattern was definite; popular tunes were the property of jazz. Jazz musicians were not only offering their own wares to the public, but were giving their own interpretations to the music of Broadway and the nonjazz songsmiths. No longer restricted to blues and blues derivatives, jazzmen moved hungrily into the pop realm in search of new material for improvisation.

In Armstrong's initial excursions were the elements essential to jazz singing: his hoarse, unbridled tone resembled the more guttural, raucous sounds of jazz instruments; he used lyrics mainly to move the melody along. Most important, he sang each number in his own manner, much as he set precedents each time he played his horn.

Nearly matching Armstrong's penetrating improvisation and feeling for popular music was Ethel Waters. Born in Chester, Pennsylvania, she had toured in several major cities before settling in New York after World War I. She brought to the tune Dinah, which she introduced, a casual jazz touch, a subtle sense of improvisation that influenced jazz singers for years to come. Trumpeter Jimmy McPartland remembered that "Bix Beiderbecke made a point of taking me to hear Ethel Waters. . . . She phrased so wonderfully, the natural quality of her voice was so fine and she sang the way she felt."

From the strolling blues singers to the violent artistry of Bessie Smith to the departures of Armstrong and Ethel Waters, jazz singing grew. And with the arrival of Mildred Bailey, it no longer remained the exclusive property of the Negro. Sophie Tucker's red-hot-mamaisms and Al Jolson's minstrel-based belting (he starred, you'll recall, in the movies' first talkie as "The Jazz Singer") were the first burgeonings of a metamorphosis from jazz into popular music. Mildred Bailey flavored everything she sang with a strong taste of Bessie Smith, and with a casually unerring sense of jazz phrasing. After her record debut in 1929, she imbued such tunes as Rockin' Chair and Lazy Bones with an easygoing jazz lilt and brought the depth of jazz emotion to such popular ballads as You Call it Madness and Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams.

Born part Indian in Tekoa, Washington, in 1903, Mildred acquired a reper (continued on page 112) Jazz Singers (continued from page 44) toire of Indian songs as a child – an odd background for her eventual jazz emergence. "I don't know whether this [Indian] music compares with jazz or the classics," she said, "but I do know that it offers a young singer a remarkable background and training. It takes a squeaky soprano and straightens out the clinkers that make it squeak; it removes the bass boom from the contralto's voice, the Indian singing does, because you have to sing a lot of notes to get by, and you've got to cover an awful range." This concern for "a lot of notes" prepared Mildred well for her massive role in jazz. In late 1929, Paul Whiteman was in California searching for a girl singer. Until that time, no band had used a female vocalist on any regular basis; Whiteman wanted to be the first. Mildred's brother, Al Rinker, and an ex-neighbor from Spokane named Bing Crosby, two thirds of Whiteman's Rhythm Boys, both joined in recommending Mildred. She auditioned and was hired. Ironically, she never cut a side with Whiteman, but she did make a few records with his sidemen: with Eddie Lang, a superb guitarist, she recorded What Kind o'Man Is You; with Matty Malneck and other Whiteman section stars, she pressed Georgia on My Mind, Rockin' Chair and several other memorable tunes. In 1933, she married Red Norvo (but persisted in calling him Kenneth) and recorded with such pros as Bunny Berigan, Johny Hodges, Teddy Wilson, Artie Shaw and Roy Eldridge. She died in 1951, her status as a jazz singer indisputable; her success set a precedent for the careers of the many female band singers who followed. A year after Mildred first recorded, trombonist Jack Teagarden joined the jazz vocal ranks with a burry Texas sound quite unlike Armstrong's, but almost as meaningful.

A first-rate trombonist from the beginning, Teagarden had been one of the sidemen in Bessie Smith's classic recording of Gimme a Pigfoot. He was aware of jazz both vocally and instrumentally. Always associated with the blues, he was one of the few white men to win recognition early among top jazzmen. Twelve-bar blues is one of his basic dialects, as one chorus of a Teagarden Beale Street Bhues will attest. Even today, he improvises as easily with his voice as with his horn; he's never strident, always soothing. Such jazz singing terms as "mam-o" for mama, "fi-o" for fire and "iath-o" for father are from the Teagarden jazz vocal lexicon. His love for the blues and his skill in singing and playing them strongly influenced the jazz of the Thirties. Tea-garden and Mildred Bailey crusaded throughout the decade for the popularity of the music they felt so deeply – simply by singing movingly and memorably in their own jazz-oriented styles. But the two major jazz voices of the Thirties had not yet arrived; they burst on the scene in the same year, 1935. Billie Holiday, who had cut one record with Benny Goodman two years before, initiated a series of discs backed by Teddy Wilson's band, and promptly wowed musicians and fans alike. Ella Fitzgerald, then a seventeen-year-old vocalist with Chick Webb's band, debuted as a recording artist.

Billie, whose life story of decay and self-destruction is well known by now, was brought up on a diet of Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and the faultless phrasing of Armstrong. Ella's smooth, clear style found some ancestry in Miss Bailey. But both were young and fresh in the mid-Thirties, and scarcely dependent on what preceded them. And as they matured, they were destined to influence the vast majority of female jazz singers to follow.

Billie was all too well qualified to sing the blues. "There was nothing about living on the sidewalks that I didn't know," she once said. "I knew how the gin joints looked on the inside; I had been singing in the after-hours joints, damp, smoky cellars, in the backs of barrooms." It was in these Harlem drives that she was heard during Prohibition, singing lowdown blues in an "I've-lived-it-buddy" style with which she was to interpret even the most romantic ballads in years to come. Here was an instrumental way of singing. As Charles Edward Smith has noted, "She may have got it mostly from Louis, from his records and from hearing him at theatres, but style comes in bits and pieces, so infinitesimal that not even a singer can be aware of every last influence. What is significant is that she has been an artist in reshaping songs and ballads, and in this, of course, Louis was the first great master."

Born Eleanora Fagan Cough in Baltimore in 1915, she was called Bill for her tomboy ways; later she changed it to Billie, after screen idol Billie Dove. Her youth was a definitive portrait of poverty and delinquency" as a teenager, she was a hustler, pot-smoker and gin-drinker. During the Depression, she pleaded for a job at Harlem's Log Cabin, run by Jerry Preston. As she recalled it, "I asked Preston for a job. He said to dance. I tried it. He said I stunk. I told him I could sing. He said: sing." She sang, She got the job. Soon after, the world reached musicians; Benny Goodman used Billie on a Columbia record date, Your Mother's Son-in-Law, as early as November 1933.

She continued gigging in Harlem and in downtown theatres, but failed to win widespread recognition until a series of record dates arranged for her by John Hammond in 1935. Joined by Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Roy Eldridge, Ben Webster and others, she cut What a Little Moonlight Will Do, I Wished on the Moon and Miss Brown to You (now available on Columbia's reissue set, Lady Day). Billie's career was made. She appeared at New York's Apollo: "There's nothing like an audience at the Apollo," she said. "They didn't ask me what my style was . . . where I'd come from, who influenced me, or anything. They just broke the house up."

Until her death in July 1959, Billie worked regularly in concerts and at top jazz spots with many notable bands and combos, including Basic and Shaw. Eventually, she began to exert considerable influence on many singers. Admittedly fond of Bessie Smith's sound and Armstrong's feeling, she became a towering jazz force, confident and vital. Her wild life, she felt, enabled her to dig deeply into the lyrics of songs. "If you find a tune and it's got something to do with you," she said, "you don't have to evolve anything. You just feel it, and when you sing it other people can feel something, too."

"I don't think I'm singing," she once said, "I feel like I am playing a horn. I try to improvise like Les Young, like Louis Armstrong, or anyone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel. I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it."

It was on a winter night in late 1935 that jazz fans journeyed to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem for a Scottsboro Boys benefit. Mildred Bailey and Bessie Smith sang. So did Ella Fitzgerald, and her artistry was immediately apparent. As one critic noted, "She moved simply to a microphone, opened her lips and sang – sang with a natural ease and a musicianship which, though untutored, needed very little assistance from Chick Webb or his musicians. Ella was and is the stunning example of an intuitive singer in jazz. From her first recording with Chick, Sing Me a Swing Song, to her latest albums, she has always found the right tempo, and right interpretive nuance, the right melodic variation."

In 1936, Ella recorded for Decca, and slightly more than a year later, with Webb, she cut her own tune, A-Tisket, A-Tasket, which zoomed to hit status. When Webb died, she took over command of the band and headed it until 1942. During the war, she collaborated with Armstrong, the Delta Rhythm Boys, pianist Eddie Heywood and the Ink Spots – to produce a series of consistently appealing sides. In 1946 and 1947, she romped her way through such scat classics as Flying Home and Lady Be Good. As jazz grew, Ella grew, incorporating bop phrases and swing riffs. Her free-flowing vocalese found counterparts for the jazz sounds of trumpet, trombone, sax and bass. During the bop insurrection, she coined a scat vocabulary that has since influenced countless other singers. In recent years, under Norman Granz' aegis, Ella has become a star on the supperclub and concert circuits, without compromising her talent.

Ella sings mellow, in the best sense of that much-abused term. Her voice is as flexible an instrument as jazz has produced, soaring to intensely lyrical apogees, descending to guttily moving emotion. She is, clichés aside, the singers' singer, and among her admirers is a gentleman who dominated the singing field all through the Thirties. "Man, woman or child, " says Bing Crosby, "the greatest singer of them all is Ella Fitzgerald." (concluded next month)