For this Bluesville date, Albertson and Spivey rounded up a couple of Spivey's old friends, who like her had been out of the limelight for a while.
Lucille Hegamin, born in 1894 in Macon, Georgia, began singing in traveling tent shows around the South when she was in her early teens. In 1914, she moved to
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Chicago, where she became a successful cabaret singer, working with the jazz musicians (including Jelly Roll Morton and Tony Jackson). She claims to have been the singer who popularized "St. Louis Blues" in Chicago, and while old-time entertainers have been known to claim all sorts of things, this is quite likely true. "St. Louis Blues" was written by W. C. Handy in 1914, and it would have been a perfect vehicle for a cabaret singer like Hegamin. It was a typical Handy composition in that it incorporated strains of tunes and snatches of words that were in circulatation at the time, but it was unusual in that it also brought together two newly popular musical forms: the blues and the tango. Probably the version of "St. Louis Blues" that she sings on this session is very close to the version she sang in Chicago--more cabaret than blues, owing little to Bessie Smith's later recording which became a kind of template for most of the versions that followed it.
It's a staple of American musichistory that Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" was the first commercial recording by an African American singer. Less widely known is that Hegamin came second, with a recording of "Jazz Me Blues" (more jazz than blues) which also became a hit, as did her followup recording, "Arkansas Blues," which she repeats on this album.
By the early 1930s, Hegamin had packed it in as performer. She got a degree in nursing, and worked in that profession until she was summoned out of retirement by Spivey. She would record again for Spivey's album, and continue singing for a few more years until ill health stopped her.
Alberta Hunter was born in 1895 in Memphis. Her father, a Pullman porter, left soon after she was born and her mother supported the family by working as a maid in a brothel. Like Hegamin and so many others, Hunter left home for Chicago to try and make it as a singer, but she did it earlier than most. She was eleven years old. Her mother followed her after a few years.
She worked when she had to, sang when and where she could, including brothels, until she came under the mentorship of Tony Jackson.
The first half of the twentieth century is dotted with the names of African Americans who contributed in ways we can never know. Josh Gibson is said by many who saw him to have been the greatest baseball player who ever lived, yet he never played a game in the major leagues. Buddy Bolden may have been one of the greatest innovators in jazz, but he never recorded.
Tony Jackson is one of those. A New Orleans transplant to Chicago, like Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, he was legend to anyone who ever heard him. It's said he could sing a whole opera, from the soprano to the bass parts, and get it all right. He could sing the blues. Even Jelly Roll Morton, famous for never giving credit to anyone but himself, credited Jackson with teaching him, and said that the only musician he ever met who was better than him was Tony Jackson. And this is a real sidebar to history, but the sartorial stereotype of the cabaret entertainer--arm garters, checkered vest, derby hat? That was Jackson.
He was also openly gay, at a time when that was not easy.
He is also said to have written dozens of songs that were stolen by others, and while there's no proving it, it's probably true. The one song he was able to retain credit for was "Pretty Baby," although co-credit was taken by Gus Kahn and Robert Van Alstyne when they used it in a Broadway show.
And he coached and encouraged young Alberta Hunter as a songwriter as well as a performer, and she became one of the best and most successful composers of the first blues era--her "Downhearted Blues" was one of Bessie Smith's best-known recordings.
Hunter had one of the most successful blues careers of the 1920s, and remained in show business until 1957, when her mother died. Her mother had been her biggest supporter, and as Hunter explained later, with her gone, the urge to perform went away. She lied about her age, faked a high school diploma, and enrolled in nursing school. Although she heeded Spivey's call to make this album, she was essentiallu out of show business. She would work as a nurse for the next twenty years, until she reached the mandatory retirement age of 70...so they thought, She was actually 82.
She decided to start singing again, although she wasn't convinced that she had much of a career ahead of her. As she described her chances in an interview with Billy Taylor:
If somebody had walked in and said to you, "I know a woman that can sing," you say "Well, ah, what does she look like?" and, well, maybe you wouldn't tell him exactly what I look like because I'm kind of ugly, you know, but you'll say, "She's all right." "OK, how old is she?" "82." "Man, you must be crazy."
But she found an ally in Barney Josephson, the entrepreneur who had opened Cafe Society, New York's first integrated nightclub, back in 1938. Billie Holiday first performed "Strange Fruit" there. Hunter had performed there often, and in 1976 Josephson had opened a new club in Greenwich Village, The Cookery, and he booked Hunter for a two week engagement. Josephson would later say:
Alberta came out and did her first show and I knew this was it. This lady was going to be big, big great star. Even better and bigger than she was before in her life.
He was right. The two week engagement lasted six years. She sang her classic hits, and new songs she had just written, like the one about the two fisted, double jointed man:
I don't want a man who'll bring his kids no dog or cat,But will bring home a skunk or a lion, and say, "Here kids, play with that."
And you could tell it would take a man like that to be man enough for this woman, even in her mid-eighties.
I went to see Alberta Hunter at the Cookery several times, once with my mother. She was in town to meet up with some Italian friends, so we all went. They loved the music, of course, but the highlight of the night for me was when my mother spotted the elderly Barney Josephson across the room. She went over, said hello and introduced herself, and reminded him that they had met before, at Cafe Society.
"Chirpin' the Blues" is one of her classics, first recorded in 1923. "I've Got Myself a Workin' Man" is from her new repertoire.
It takes a woman who's pretty confident to invite two scene-stealers like these to share her debut album with her, and Victoria Spivey was all of that. Her straight-ahead blues belting makes a nice contrast to her two friends' cabaret styles. "Let Him Beat Me" is a song you wouldn't find many women singing today, but to a singer from certain generation it was a badge of toughness. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith both sang songs on the same theme. "Black Snake Blues" is a familiar theme in the blues, but Spivey, another strong composer, twists it a little. Her black snake is both the snake-in-the grass woman who steals her man and the penis by which he's led away. Spivey also contributes some piano backing to her songs.
Hegamin is accompanied by a group led by Willie "the Lion" Smith, Hunter and Spivey by Buster Bailey Blues Busters. That means that some very fine veteran musicians were gathered together for this day of music making in an New York recording studio.
Willie "the Lion" Smith served in France during World War I, and he got the nickname for his bravery and ferocity in battle (his version), or he gave it himself (the version of others). Regardless, he was a lion at the piano, one of the innovators of the stride style of playing.
Trumpeter Henry Goodwin started young in the music business, touring Europe with Claude Hopkins at the age of 15. He played with Cliff Jackson and Elmer Snowden, two musicians also later brought to Bluesville by Chris Albertson, and with Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway, Kenny Clarke, Sidney Bechet and others. Clarinet/tenor sax player Cecil Scott led his own bands in the 1920s and 1930s, hiring such luminaries as Dicky Wells, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Hodges and Chu Berry. Drummer Gene Brooks was younger. Born in 1920, he arrived on the New York scene in the 1940s, and was much in demand for studio work, playing behind jazz, blues and rhythm and blues singers.
Smith's group gave way to Buster Bailey's for the next two sessions. Clarinetist Bailey comes from as distinguished a pedigree as you can get. Starting with W. C. Handy when he was just 15, he went on to play with King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong. His band had some all stars too: J. C. Higginbotham, Cliff Jackson and Zutty Singleton have all been heard on previous Prestige recordings. Trumpeter Sidney de Paris was one of the masters of his instrument and his era. He played with Benny Carter, Art Hodes, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and in later years led a group with his brother, Wilbur.
The Bluesville release was called Songs We Taught Your Mother.
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