May West was an excellent jazz singer.
So was Sophie Tucker. She actually contracted for singing lessons from Mamie Smith and Ethel Waters.
And has anybody heard the throaty but delightful recordings actress Tallulah Bankhead made in London around 1932?
I did worse than that. I'd been up all night doing OTR research on the Internet, then tumbled into bed about an hour before the first plane struck the WTC. I slept through everything. So I learned the news all at once around 4:30 PM.
The September 21, 1939 Broadcast Day was my very first purchase (on reel-to-reel tape) when I first began seriously collecting OTR during the late 1970s. (Before that I had been limited to a few 16-inch transcriptions I'd remastered, George Garadenian-type phonograph records and early OTR...
My all-time favorite singer, forgotten or otherwise, is Marion Harris. (And NOBODY'S been as unfairly forgotten as Marion.)
But let me also mention Cincinnati's own Ruby Wright, the wife of bandleader Barney Rapp, the leader who gave a very young Doris Kappelhoff (Doris Day) her start.
Thank you, Chas, for your mention of Miss Lee Morse. I was beginning to think that nobody here remembered her!
She made wonderful jazz recordings with her three-octave range. In fact. that was why the record producers insisted on the "Miss" in her name. When she used used her lower...
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