The Mystery of Hazel Green

There is a gent on IMDB who speculates that the Hazel Green in the 1927 Vitaphone Hazel Green & Company is the granddaughter of Confederate General John Stuart Williams and was born on July 3, 1892. Williams, who later became a U.S. Senator and the Founder of Naples, Florida, was from Kentucky. Early in the war, when still a Colonel, he participated in futile efforts to prevent a Union takeover of his home state, which included a minor action in the community of Hazel Green.  The writer claims that the singer is named after this military action,  that he “once read a bio of her”, and that she got the job due to “producers romancing antebellum times.” The fact that one of the songs in her set is “Just a Bird’s Eye View (of My Old Kentucky Home)” is possible support of that idea.

And yet I’m doubtful. I can’t find corroboration anywhere and it sounds like a stretch. Why would you name a child after one of your defeats? Among other things. And there is the fact that Hazel Green looks like she may be African American, as do a couple of her musicians. Her performance and the set are jazzy (it includes a very peppy, uptempo version of “Ain’t She Sweet”). Green tap dances in the film, along with a guest named Joe Lacurta. And one of the few references I can find to a singer named Hazel Green says she briefly formed a duo with blues pioneer Bessie Smith in 1918. Show biz was almost entirely segregated in those days; while not impossible, a black-and-white singing duo would have been rarer than rare. It would have meant that the white singer was willing to forego the better salaries and conditions of mainstream show business in order to perform in black vaudeville with Smith, which would be saintly but also highly unlikely. So the Hazel Green who sang with Bessie Smith etc had to have been at least partially black herself.

And then there’s this, taken from a book, which says she and her mother, one “Ma” Green choreographed a show at the Southland club in Boston, with Blanche Calloway (Cab Calloway’s sister) and a 14 piece band supplying the music in 1937.

Also, in the Bassically Speaking: An Oral History of George Duvivier, the musician’s mother Ismay Duvivier speaks of her own show business days and says this: “We all worked on the T.O.B.A. circuit…For a while I traveled with Ma Green and her daughter. That was a small combo…Normally there was about twelve girls in a [chorus] line, but there was one big production that required much more…” She also mentions a date in Baltimore (see below for the significance of that).

And we note that black artists were indeed represented in the Vitaphones. Hazel Green & Company is Vitaphone #2112. Just a couple of weeks earlier, the company had recorded Vitaphone #2009: Carolynne Snowden and Company “Colored Syncopation”. 

In short, the Hazel Green in the first paragraph does not sound much like the Hazel Green in the subsequent paragraphs. And yet there is a possible third way. I found this reference to Williams’ step-son Colonel A.W. Hamilton fathering children with Williams’ mulatto cook in the 1870s. This practice may have been rooted in the family culture. Williams was married twice, but there was a period of a dozen years between the death of his first wife, and his marriage to his second one. During this period, he owned upwards of 50 slaves. And it’s well documented that master-slave relationships and forced concubinage existed during those times. So it’s possible that Hazel Green is BOTH a descendant of Williams AND part African American. This is the wildest speculation on my part; I’m just trying to reconcile some seemingly contradictory puzzle pieces with logic. I’ve come across very little information on the woman, and would obviously welcome more.

But little pieces do help fill it in and contribute to this case. In the 1927 Vitaphone we see Green leading a quintet of musicians. I found an ad for her for performing in Baltimore with a “company of five” in 1922. Seems like the same woman. And the collaboration with Bessie Smith was also in Baltimore. So THAT seems like the same woman. This January 1923 ad for an engagement at Poli’s Bridgeport describes her act (“Hazel Green and Her Band”) as a “Riot of Color” — a possible allusion to the race of the performers, lending authenticity of the jazz, which was common in advertising at the time:

I find other references to the band playing in Pittsburgh, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Toronto, Brooklyn and New York City. The act is sometimes billed as “Hazel Green and Her Boys” or “Hazel Green and Her Beau Brummels”. All of these references pre-date the Vitaphone release. Oddly, I can find no references to her after it. Did she retire? Die? Change her name? Again, wild speculation, but I found a reference to a Hazel Green who was born in 1929 to a mother named Hazel Williams Green and a father named Dewey Green. Could Hazel Williams Green be our singer, given all that we wrote above? The timing would be right (many female performers retired to start families), as would the maiden name, though, granted, its a common one. At any rate, we put this out there in case anyone has the true facts — we’d be only too glad to have the record clarified and corrected so folks can learn the truth about this interesting and entertaining singer and bandleader.

You can see clips from Hazel’s Vitaphone on Youtube. In addition to the numbers already mentioned, the group also performed “That’s Why I Love You” and “I’ve Grown So Lonely.”

To learn more about vaudeville history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

 

 

Mayer and Evans: The Cowboy and the Girl

April 24 is the birthday of big band and jazz piano player Ray Mayer (Ray Maher, 1901-1949). Originally from Lexington, Nebraska, he started out in circuses and in some bands organized by trombonist and songwriter Larry Conley. In 1928, he teamed up with singer Edith Evans, whom he seems to have met while recording sides for Brunwsick Records. They were both high profile enough that they were able to play the Palace that year, and be featured in the Vitaphone shorts When East Meets West and  The Cowboy and the Girl, which is chiefly what they are known for today. The act is sort of like Blossom Seeley and Benny Fields, but if Fields were much more like Will Rogers — a gun-chewing, wisecracking country bloke in chaps. And the gag is that Evans is more urban and sophisticated. It’s a good act, but 1928 was a terrible time to start a vaudeville act. Vaudeville was dead by 1932. The following year, the pair got married and retired the act.

Evans appears to have left the business at this point, but Mayer worked steadily. He appeared in scores of films until his death, often B movie westerns, mostly bit parts. And he’s in half a dozen Broadway shows from 1940 through 1946, including the original production of Louisiana Purchase and Eddie Cantor’s Banjo Eyes. Mayer died in 1949 while on traveling to a performance. More about the pair can be learned at JazzAge20s.com

To find out more about vaudeville history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold. For more on early  film please see my book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Mound City Blue Blowers

Today is the birthday of William “Red” McKenzie (1899-1948).  Originally from St. Louis, he became a prominent Jazz Age figure by playing the kazoo and comb-and-tissue paper!

In 1923, with musical partner Jack Bland, McKenzie formed the Mound City Blue Blowers. McKenzie played comb, Bland played banjo, Dick Slevin played kazoo, and Frank “Josh” Billings played percussion (often whisk brooms struck against a suitcase). They cut several hit records, made two performance films, and were popular in vaudeville and on radio. Some of the top jazz men of the day sat in on on their records, including Jack Teagarden, Coleman Hawkins, Glenn Miller, Pee Wee Russell, Jimmy Dorsey and Bunny Berrigan. McKenzie was also a crooner and sang with his own orchestra outside the Blue Blowers, as well as with bands like Paul Whiteman’s. The Blue Blowers folded in 1936. McKenzie retired from show business in the late 1930s, although he returned as a singer from 1944 through 1947.

For more on vaudeville history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Bee Palmer: Transplanted the Shimmy

Today is the birthday of Beatrice “Bee” Palmer (1894-1967).

Originally from Chicago, Palmer began performing in local venues before moving to New York in the late teens. With her she appears to have brought jazz and the Shimmy. She was largely identified with the latter dance and claimed to be its originator, although Gilda Gray, Mae West and others made the same claim. Whatever white dancer brought it to mainstream show biz first though, it was almost certainly appropriated from African American dancers. Palmer  performed in both the Ziegfeld Follies and Midnight Frolics in 1918 and was voted Most Popular on the Keith vaudeville circuit in 1919. Palmer not only danced but sang, and originally accompanied herself on piano as well. But it was her dancing that made her notorious, both celebrated and reviled — many commentators considered her the equivalent of what we now thing of as a “stripper”. In 1920 she toured the big time with a tab revue written by Herman Timberg called “Oh, Bee!”. By then she worked with accompanist Al Siegel, whom she married while on tour in 1921. Later that year she had an affair with boxer Jack Dempsey which resulted in public scandal and a lawsuit for alienation of affections. Palmer and Siegel reconciled a few months later and would remain married through 1928 (Siegel went on to work with a young Ethel Merman). Palmer worked with a succession of jazz bands (including the New Orleans Rhythm Kings) and accompanists throughout the 1920s and early 30s on Keith, Orpheum and Loew times, returned to the Midnight Frolics in 1921 and appeared in the Passing Show in 1924. She moved back to Chicago and retired in the mid to late 30s. By then vaudeville had died, and her brand of performance was no longer popular in night clubs.

While she never release any records during her lifetime, she had actually privately cut many during the teens and twenties, which have survived. Here’s one she made in 1929 with the support of Paul Whiteman:

To learn more about vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

 

To learn more about silent and slapstick comedy, please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Why George Segal Plays the Banjo

Today is the birthday of George Segal (b. 1934). Most of us know him as a likable comic (sometimes dramatic) actor and (like Elliott Gould and Dustin Hoffman) one of the first generation of New Yorky Jewish males to achieve leading man status in Hollywood, as opposed to being a) comedians, b) character actors, or c) downplaying their identity. Though Segal started getting national exposure in the early 60s, I think of his peak as the mid-1970s, in movies like Robert Altman’s California Split (1974), The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox with Goldie Hawn (1976), the disaster movie Rollercoaster (1977), and the comedy Fun with Dick and Jane with Jane Fonda (1977). Younger people know him from his stints as a regular on the sit-coms Just Shoot Me (1997-2003) and The Goldbergs (now). But what I really want to talk to you about is why George Segal plays the banjo.

If you’ve ever seen Segal on a talk show (or increasingly in the context of a role he’s supposed to be playing, like on a sit-com) surely you must be aware that he plays the banjo. You know this because he foists it upon you, he imposes it like an obnoxious relative, one who enjoys being obnoxious and relishes your eye-rolling. His enthusiasm for the instrument is child-like, always has been, and God bless him for it. Segal’s thing is Dixieland and that’s the thing I want to talk about, because as time goes on, and audiences get younger and younger, it seems to me that when he does his thing he must be increasingly hanging out there like a lost puzzle piece. A single puzzle piece, lacking the rest of the puzzle. He just kind of seems like a kook, or the last dodo, because there’s never any context for it. And there actually IS some context. Did you ever stop to wonder “Why Dixieland?” That style was well on the way to being over when Segal was born! But fortunately there are other pieces of the puzzle out there, and when you start to put them together it starts to add up to an interesting thread of jazz and pop culture history.

Here’s another piece of the puzzle, a clue, hanging out there in plain sight. Woody Allen, who plays clarinet in trad jazz bands, is about the same age as Segal. As is the cartoonist R. Crumb, who plays banjo in the same types of bands. (These examples will grate on actual jazz fans because they are merely celebrities from other fields who play jazz for pleasure. As it happens there are guys in the field who’ve devoted their whole lives to it, but their names are less well known to the general public. The best known outfit is the Preservation Hall Jazz Band). But think for a minute how old these guys are. They’re the wrong age. When they were young adults in the late 50s and early 60s, the mainstream music embraced by the older generation was big band inflected pop (Frank Sinatra); younger people listened to rock and roll or folk. So where are these other guys coming from?

Here’s your context!

First we have to rewind. Originally what we now call “Dixieland” was just jazz, right? In the teens and twenties that New Orleans style, with lots of simultaneous improvisation, and a line-up that included banjo, clarinet, trombone and trumpet or cornet (adapted from marching bands) was what defined the music. But then, in the 1930s and 40s the music began to change. Big bands and then swing became popular, with sophisticated arrangements, and guys using charts, and improvisation restricted to solos by key instruments at certain moments. Now, those of us who are interested in pop culture history have a simplistic tendency to think about everything as a progression. Thus, when you talk about jazz history, it tends to be: “Early jazz, followed by big band, followed by be bop, followed by free jazz and fusion, etc.” But in reality it’s never been that clean. When big band and swing became popular with mainstream audiences, there were many holdouts in the jazz community who were insistent on maintaining the purity of the earlier style. They became known pejoratively within the jazz community as “moldy figs”: conservative, reactionary, resistant to the new. To be playing what we now call Dixieland, the style of 1918, was considered pretty uncool in 1938.

By the time of be bop in the 1940s, this musical argument achieved greater clarity. Be bop itself was a radical movement with a fringe audience at best. In some ways it was a return to the anarchy of jazz’s beginnings, but in many other ways it broke new ground. The moldy figs became like jazz’s extreme right wing to be bop’s extreme left wing, for it was just as radical, just as eccentric a choice. By the 1950s, the choice to be a moldy fig became a lot cooler. Young people don’t have the baggage older people do about the styles their parents are backing away from. Louis Armstrong, one of the inventors of jazz, had a lot of hit records in the 50s and 60s. Dave Van Ronk writes about this period in The Mayor of MacDougal Street; early in his career he came down on the side of the moldy figs and played banjo in Dixieland bands, which were popular and got bookings in the 1950s!  And if you think about it, it begins to make a lot of sense. There would be this kind of crossover between trad jazz and folk, for example. Early mainstream folk had a lot of banjo in it. Looking backwards for inspiration was big. Trad jazz was even more popular in the U.K. (I wrote a bit about this in No Applause) and a lot of this crossed over into rock and roll and pyschedelia in the 60s. The Lovin’ Spoonful originally played jug band music; Janis Joplin had initially sung classic blues in the Bessie Smith style; and Paul McCartney had a grounding in trad jazz because of his father. The list is long.

So this the context. George Segal began playing in Dixieland bands in college in the 1950s, because oddly enough, there was an audience for it then! It was kind of hip! By 1967, thanks to his success as an actor, he was able to record his first Dixieland record The Yama Yama Man (named after the 1908 song). In 1974 he released another album A Touch of Ragtime. By that time Dixieland was WAY out of fashion again at least in the kind of versions he put out on the record. But Segal never stopped playing with various trad jazz ensembles throughout his career. And now we’ve reached a unique time when there is a simultaneous subculture for every style of music, be it Dixieland, be bop, doo wop or 80s technopop. And burlesque and vaudeville too have toeholds however tenuous.

Here’s Segal with Teresa Brewer performing Alexander’s Ragtime Band. His banjo playing is a little buried in this arrangement though!

To learn more about show biz history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And don’t miss my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc  

King Oliver: Dippermouth Blues

 

Today is the birthday of the great jazz pioneer Joe “King” Oliver (1881-1938), a cornet player and trumpeter often considered a sort of link in the chain between the legendary Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong. He started out playing in brass bands in the fabled Storyville section of New Orleans around 1908, where he was considered one of the hottest musicians in the city. A decade later he left NOLA and settled in Chicago in the early ’20s to form his popular Creole Jazz Band, and later his Dixie Syncopators. Bad health and financial setbacks forced his decline throughout the 30s, killing him by 1938.

Oliver was highly influential in his employment of mutes on his horn. You can hear him do that on his 1923 of “the Dippermouth Blues”, Oliver’s own composition, which is likely named after Armstrong, who played in the band and was sometimes known as Dippermouth. This tune’ll get the blood flowin’. I just had to play it twice I liked it so well!

For more on show biz history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold. 

And don’t  miss my new book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Buddy Bolden, “Father of Jazz”

Today is the birthday of Charles Joseph “Buddy” Bolden (1877-1931). This seminal New Orleans cornet player is credited by many with being the Father of Jazz, although when he was making his innovations (from around 1900 to 1907) it didn’t yet go by that name.

Bolden was among the first to bring musical ideas from gospel and the blues to marching band music, pioneering ragtime and what came to be known as jazz just a few years later when Bolden’s admirers like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong began to emulate him. In 1907 he was committed to a mental institution as a result of his acute dementia (we won’t speculate here on the medical cause of it).

While no recordings of Bolden’s playing exist, many tunes were composed in his honor. Here’s Jelly Roll Morton performing one of them:

To learn more about the history of show business, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc