Jezebels and other pioneering dead chicks
Ruth Brown 12 January 1928 - 17 November 2006
Anita O’Day 18 October 1919 - 23 November 2006
Betty Comden 3 May 1917 - 23 November 2006
By Corinna Tomrley
While passing on the news of another celebrity death to my dad I made an observation; I reckon more celebs die at the end of the year, or at least you get more of a cluster in the winter months. It could be down to a combination of old + cold = pneumonia but my dad took this comment as a request to ‘research’ the matter and look into his ‘Celebrity Death Files’ for evidence to back my theory. Perhaps it is not too surprising that I should be thinking in these terms.
My thoughts of the Winter Reaper came on the back a trio of deaths that robbed the music world of three women who had a significant impact on their genres, and all in the space of a fortnight: Ruth Brown who passed away on the 17th November and on Thanksgiving day, 23rd November both Jazz-Scatter Anita O’Day and song/stage/screenplay writer Betty Comden met their demise.
Ruth Brown sang the kind of R&B that was literally rhythm and blues - not the generic and meaningless contemporary definition of ‘urban soul’ type stuff. Her music slipped between genres as was the want of the era - 40s and 50s - mixing pop and R&B to create raucous rock and roll or soulful ballads that became trademark sounds for ‘Miss Rhythm’, ‘The Girl with the Teardrop in Her Voice’ and ‘The Queen Mother of the Blues’ - all the same lady, our Ruthie. A hit-churner and one of the biggest selling female artists of the 50s, Brown helped establish the label she was signed to so that Atlantic became known as ‘the house that Ruth built’. Of the same calibre as other superb R&B women like Wynona Carr and the equally pop-enabled Lavern Baker, Brown was as distinctive and individual as both those lady-greats. Her vivacious appearances on ‘Showtime at the Apollo’ (you can see them on YouTube) proved her performance prowess; Brown not only hit you with the tune, but gave it a humour or heartache appropriate to the lyric.
It was at the Apollo in Harlem that she got her break, winning a talent contest. This came after her father - a devout Christian - found her singing secular pop songs with the USO shows and took his belt to her right there on the stage. She wasn’t deterred but went on to pursue her dream - to be as big as Billie Holiday. Holiday appeared one night while Brown was in residence at The Café Society not amused to find Ruth Brown singing Billie Holiday songs. However when Brown spoke to her, Holiday was unusually generous and gave the advise not to imitate but to be her own woman.
The hits dried up and having to turn to domestic service to make ends meet she fought long and hard for her royalties and won, setting up The Rhythm and Blues Foundation which strove to recoup royalties on behalf of other’s wronged in this way. Her later years were of the comeback variety, winning a Tony on Broadway, appearing as Motormouth Maybelle in Hairspray and recording a healthy output of jazz, blues and revisiting R&B. Ruth was a pioneer, a fighter and an influential belter, inspiring many including Etta James, Tina Turner and even Little Richard acknowledged a debt to her leaping wail. In fact, watch her performance of ‘Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean’ and you could be mistaken for thinking it’s really Richard in drag. Her voice, her style and her chutzpah are as infectious and as fresh as they ever were as you listen to her music now. And if Ruth Brown was an unknown name to you before reading this piece, I heartily recommend that you do.
Anita O’Day had her own distinctive vocal dexterity and an improvisational style that got her sacked from a gig with innovative music mad man Raymond Scott. Bizarrely for a man associated with experimental inventiveness, he only encouraged improvisation in the rehearsal process so when O’Day forgot the words to a song and went into a scat instead, he sent her packing. He wasn’t the only one who didn’t like her making it up; she would have temporary and temperamental associations with many band leaders including Benny Goodman who rejected her at her first audition for improvising. Then when they toured years later he tried to upstage her and when that failed, cut her numbers down to two out of spite. Amongst the others she worked with were the important innovators Gene Krupa and Stan Kenton, men who stretched the limits of the music and co-wrote, with other legends such as O‘Day, the story of jazz. She studied music theory at the suggestion of first husband Don Carter and it was the music - rather than the chance to ‘just’ sing, ‘just’ perform that drove her. O’Day was jazz; she was hip before it was hip to be hip, and she was beat before that became the hip thing to be. Her association with drummers - husband Carter, Krupa, John Poole - makes perfect sense with her style of improvisation in which she duelled, sparred or conducted musical dialogues with them. Within her own vocals she sang like a fight between a snare and upright bass string being stretched out. ‘I got pitch and I got smarts,’ explained O’Day, ‘and you’ll never hear an interpretation of a song the way I do it’.
Her husky tones were possibly the result of a botched tonsillectomy - which did not remove her vibrato as is reported (I can hear vibrato in her tunes) but did restrict her vocals, pushing her to evolve her voice into one of a singing gymnast; listen to how she extends the word 'fellas', making it an elastic 7 syllables long during ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’. Her iconic performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, captured in Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960) was one of her proudest moments, especially when only her picture appeared in Time magazine, reporting the event.
Like Ruth Brown with Atlantic, O’Day was partly responsible for the successful beginnings of Norman Granz’s new label Verve, as the first vocalist recorded for the label. Granz at first resisted having her on the imprint because he didn’t believe she could sell records. ‘Anita’ sold 365,000 albums and enabled Granz to buy out Ella Fitzgerald’s contract and go on to record the fabled ‘Songbook’ series that proved Ella's genius.
O’Day spoke frankly of her decades long heroin addiction, describing it as ‘better than a martini, better than sex’ and which saw her jailed for six months in 1953, then nearly dying of an overdose in 1969. Her descriptions of hanging out with Charlie Parker and ‘getting turned on with Bird’ don’t leave the impression that she had many regrets of her debauched existence. Such attitudes and activities earned her the nickname ‘The Jezebel of Jazz’. She recorded up until the end resulting in the haunting ‘Indestructible (Dig?)’ this year, and a feature length documentary, ‘Anita O’Day: the life of a jazz singer’ due to be released in early 2007, boasting plenty of interview footage with the Jezebel (a snippet can be seen on YouTube). Leaving home at 12 and beginning her professional singing career at 14, the feisty broad was fighting until the end. O’Day was taken to hospital with pneumonia, demanding to be sent home. She didn’t get her last wish, passing away at the hospital in her sleep.
While not a renowned vocalist or performing star, Betty Comden was a respected and important ingredient of the heyday of Hollywood musicals. I first heard of Comden whilst reading a biography of Judy Holliday in my early teens. Comden and her writing partner of some 40 years, Adolph Green, had a musical revue with Holliday when she was still Judith Tuvim. The group, performing in Greenwich Village, were accompanied by a piano player called Leonard Bernstein who would go on to collaborate with Comden and Green on the stage production of ‘On The Town’. Think of that - Lenny Bernstein as a tinkler for a vaudeville act. Firmly established as part of the (Arthur) Freed unit at MGM and one of the many unsung women who blazed a quiet trail through the Hollywood studios, she influenced productions and produced iconic pieces of history. Comden with Green wrote the screenplay and arranged the songs for Singin’ in the Rain and when producer Freed rejected Bernstein’s score and songs for the movie version of On The Town, they supplied some worthy substitutes. The pair didn’t want the Singin’ in the Rain gig at first and offered their money back; only when they came up with the idea of setting it in the era of the Freed penned songs - the beginning of the movie musicals - did it gel and the excitement for all involved begin. The movie is now considered to be one of the best - if not the best- movie musicals of all time and the contribution to that success of Comden and Green can not be underestimated.
For me, as a long-time worshipper of movie musicals, the appearance of Comden and Green on many documentaries to do with the genre, telling their tales with dead pan wit and underselling their part, encompassed the quiet foundations that lie beneath many creative monuments. While starting out a performer (and snaffling one of the key roles in ‘On The Town’ when it was on Broadway), Comden was content to sew her magic behind the scenes, a place where her impact could permeate the whole picture.
Not to paint all of these women as tragic figures, but to prove that life outside of jazz, blues and rock and roll wasn’t all musical utopia, Comden outlived her husband (not, as often thought, Adolph Green but a businessman called Steve Kyle) and two children, one of whom died of an AIDS related illness contracted through his heroin addiction.
The passing of these ladies truly heralds that old chestnut - the end of an era. Only Etta James can argue to be the last of the belting blues mamas of Ruth Brown’s era, but I would argue that despite her own Little Richard-influenced start (who, don’t forget was influenced by Brown such is the chain of inspiration), James is most remembered as a 60s soul diva, not a rock n roller. Anita O’Day can surely claim to be amongst the very last of the iconic jazz performers, many of whom succumbed in their own time, those who hung on - Ella, Peggy - leaving their own holes in recent years. Comden was one of the last surviving Freeders - a collaborator of the C&G dynamic duo is still around: Gene Kelly’s co-director Stanley Donen. That these three chicks were so significant in their respective fields only makes the fact of their dying so closely in time more worthy of reflection; these women made an imprint on the music (and movie and theatre) world that while recognised, isn’t sung quite so loudly as some of the praise their contemporaries receive; these ladies could sing their songs their own way and it is that, which reminds us just what they were capable of.