Little children of dark skin—not just Negroes, but Puerto Ricans, Mexicans,
everybody of color—had no heroes in the movies. I was glad to give
them something to identify with.
Herb
Jeffries (1998)
One of my favorite show business
personalities that most people have long forgotten died on Sunday.
Jazz/pop/R&B singer and actor Herb Jeffries died on heart failure
in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 100 years old. He was born Umberto Valentino on
September 24, 1913, in Detroit, to a racially mixed couple. His
mother was white. His father was a Sicilian whose own father came
from Ethiopia. He began singing as a teenager, eventually moving to
Chicago. His first major gig was with the Erskine Tate Orchestra,
but he was recruited by Earl "Fatha" Hines and sang with him in 1933 and
1934. During the late '30s, he concentrated on his movie career.
Herb Jeffries was not a typical jazz
singer. He had a rich baritone voice, and was known primarily for his ballads. He joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1940, and
co-starred with Dorothy Dandridge in the musical Jump for Joy.
Here is is reminiscing about Ellington and the play.
I highly recommend several other parts
of Jeffries' interview, where he talks about Louis Armstrong, Hines, and the members of the Ellington band. In December 1940, he recorded his signature piece, "Flamingo," with the Ellington band. The song was
covered by Tony Martin for the pop charts. Jeffries joked that he
knew Martin had copied his version because he made some of the same
mistakes. Here is the 1941 “soundie” of Jeffries and the band doing “Flamingo.”
After leaving Ellington, Herb Jeffries
worked as a single artist, remaining active until the '90s. He was drafted
during World War II. After the war, he had hits with “Basin Street
Blues” and “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano.” In 1945, he reached #2 on the R&B charts with “Left a Good Deal in Mobile,” backed by Joe Liggins
and the Honeydrippers, with Jack McVea on tenor sax.
Herb Jeffries is an example of
a singer whose career was hurt by music business segregation. He was
basically a pop singer, but because he was an African-American, his
recordings were confined to the “race music” ghetto, and later
misclassified as R&B. This "catch-22" separated him from his natural audience. He lived in France in the early '50s. Most of his later recordings were ballads, but he occasionally performed cowboy songs
and calypso music. Here he is in 1957, and in 1989.
Herb Jeffries' second career was as an
actor. While touring the South, he noticed black children's
enthusiasm for western movies featuring white “cowboys.” This
gave him an idea. He joined with producer Jeb Buell to make four of what he called “C-movies”—low budget
westerns with all-black casts. Sometimes billed as “Herbert
Jeffrey,” he starred as a singing cowboy in Harlem on the
Prairie (1937), Two
Gun Man From Harlem (1938),
Harlem Rides the Range (1939)
and The Bronze Buckaroo (1939).
The latter three of these films can be seen on You Tube, albeit with
poor picture and sound quality.
According
to Donald Bogle, author of Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies
and Bucks, the definitive
history of all-black films:
Herb was a sex symbol. With his wavy hair and Clark Gable mustache, he might have
been a different kind of star had America been a different kind of
place.
He
played the title role in the 1957 film Calypso Joe,
which starred Angie Dickinson. He also played small parts on
television. Actor-director Mario Van Peebles paid
tribute to him by including scenes from his movies in the 1993 black
western Posse.
When he died, Herb Jeffries was married
to his fifth wife. One of his ex-wives was the stripper Tempest
Storm.
The New York Times obituary of
Herb Jeffries chides him for making inconsistent statements
about his date of birth and his father's ethnicity. The Times
appears to be judging behavior from a previous era by contemporary
standards. They fail to empathize with the role race
played in limiting the career opportunities of black
performers.
