Gene Austin

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Gene Austin

Gene Austin (born June 24, 1900 in Gainesville , Texas , † January 24, 1972 in Palm Springs , California ) was an American singer and songwriter. He is considered one of the most successful artists of the 1920s and 1930s. With his sensitive singing style, he became the pioneer of crooners . His greatest successes include songs like My Blue Heaven , When My Sugar Walks Down the Street and The Lonesome Road , which became pop and jazz classics.

In addition to numerous appearances on stage and on the radio, he had a number of film appearances as a supporting actor as The Voice of the Southland , often alongside Mae West . He also played a leading role as a singing cowboy in the western Songs and Saddles (1938) .

Life

Childhood and youth

Gene Austin was born Lemuel Eugene Lucas , the name Austin he had to take over after his parents divorced from his stepfather.

Gainesville found himself on the route of the Chisholm Trail , which was then still more frequented , and he learned the songs of the old west from the cowboys who passed through . However, his mother feared he might be trampled to death by the cattle and therefore forbade him to go further on the trail. Thereupon his forays led him into the red light district, where he followed the improvised performances of the piano players in the "parlor houses", i. H. the local establishments, listened and ran errands for them.

Shortly after his mother remarried, Austin's stepfather, a farrier, brought his new family to Yellow Pine, Louisiana , to avoid meeting his wife's ex-husband. Little Gene hated his new surroundings, especially the humid climate, and longed to go back to his Texan homeland. Most of all, however, he hated his stepfather, who frequently beat him and used him to work in the forge.

Nevertheless, it was here that his musical stamping took place. In order to at least temporarily escape the abuse of his stepfather, he made friends with black cotton pickers and spent a lot of time with them, especially with his "surrogate father" Uncle Esau . There he got to know and appreciate their music and, above all, found the security that he sorely missed at home.

At the age of 15 he decided to escape his overpowering stepfather and his unloved home. After various jobs at a circus and at fairs, he joined a vaudeville show, where he first appeared as a singer. There he sang a colorful mix of cowboy songs, Uncle Esau's 'black' songs and the “parlor house blues”.

After these years of wandering, he moved to New Orleans , where he first worked as a pianist in a nightclub and finally joined the army. There he served both in Mexico in the campaign against Pancho Villa and in France in the First World War . During a stay in the infirmary, the army dentist Lt. Knapp know who suggested he become his assistant at home. First, however, he worked for a year as Knapp's assistant in Paris .

First successes

After his return to the USA, Austin studied dentistry for a short time on Knapp's advice, then law. However, he continued to perform in a nightclub in the evenings. There he met the singer Roy Bergere , who convinced him to perform together in the vaudeville industry, but initially with little success. During this time, however, Austin discovered his talent as a songwriter. One of his compositions, How Come You Do Me Like You Do , was a great success for him and Bergere and helped them to a job in the Mahjong Club of Lou Clayton , who with his partners Jimmy Durante and Eddie Jackson , the famous vaudeville trio Clayton, Jackson and Durante made up. After Bergere married and wanted to build a career with his wife, Austin initially continued to work in the club until it was closed during Prohibition .

He then found work as a songwriter, first for the music publishing Stark & Cowan , then for the publisher Jack Mills Inc. , which already How Come You Do Me Like You Do had moved. While still at Stark & ​​Cowan, he married his first wife, Kathryn Arnold, in 1924; he was married five times in total. Through Mills, Austin came into contact with Vocalion Records , which were to record the blind hillbilly musician George Reneau on behalf of a chain of stores from Nashville . Since his “absolutely impossible” voice was not well received by those responsible, but they did not want to alienate their customers, the idea of ​​letting him take over the vocal part was due to Austin's origin from the southern states. Austin himself didn't mind this type of music, however as a professional singer he was able to pinpoint the style he wanted, and even yodel . In total, Vocalion released 6 recordings in this way, but withheld Austin's involvement. Only after these sold well did Austin and Reneau make a few more recordings for Edison Records under the name Blue Ridge Duo in September 1924 .

breakthrough

Austin's big break came in 1924 when he was asked to compose a few songs for Victor's star Aileen Stanley . The first song he introduced to her and Victor's music director Nat Shilkret was his own composition When My Sugar Walks Down the Street . Both were so enthusiastic about his song and his person that Shilkret offered him a duet with Stanley and, if successful, promised a permanent contract.

The duet with Aileen Stanley impressed those responsible for Victor so much that further recordings soon followed. In 1925 Austin had his first big hit as a solo artist with Yearning . The success was so great that Austin decided to quit his job at Mills and focus entirely on his career as a singer. In fact, hit after hit was to follow: in the next ten years Austin sold 80 million records, a record that would remain untouched for the next 40 years. Between 1925 and 1934 he was able to place 55 titles in the top 20. In the summer of 1925, his immense popularity even took him to London , where he performed in the famous Princess Club .

In addition to his talent as a songwriter, Austin's success was due to his unmistakable sense of a hit. He often resorted to pieces by foreign composers that were rejected by colleagues and made them great successes, such as Yes Sir, That's My Baby by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson , now a classic, or Forgive Me by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen . Conversely, Austin's own works also became great successes for other artists, such as The Lonesome Road (1927), composed with Nat Shilkret in the Afro-American style , which was used in the first film adaptation of the musical Show Boat in 1929 and has since been used by almost countless artists from the most diverse Genres was recorded, among them Louis Armstrong , Sammy Davis, Jr. or Judy Garland .

However, since, to his great disappointment, he did not manage to convince those responsible at Victor to also produce African-American music, he founded his own music publishing house a little later. In this way - and through numerous live performances - he hoped to make this music more popular. He also regularly visited the clubs in Harlem to make contacts there. Here he got to know Fats Waller , the foundation for a long personal friendship and successful cooperation. Austin should 1929 a. a. Waller's classic Ain't Misbehavin ' and, against racist reservations, got it through with some musicians as a pianist on various of his recordings.

In 1927, disputes between Austin and Shilkret accumulated over the material Austin wanted to record. It was only against Shilkret's resistance that Austin finally managed to record the song My Blue Heaven , composed by Walter Donaldson and George Whiting . It was to be Austin's biggest hit, which stayed in the charts for a total of 26 weeks in 1927/1928 - 13 weeks of which was at the top - and sold over 5 million times.

Crisis and film career

However, Austin's life was not free from blows of fate. Uncle Esau had already died in 1925, and his newborn son died shortly after the publication of My Blue Heaven . In the same year, he was nearly killed when his yacht My Blue Heaven was caught in a severe storm on the Atlantic Ocean near Southport, North Carolina. In addition, he was constantly struggling with increasing alcohol problems, which ultimately ended in his first divorce.

The global economic crisis ultimately led to its sales figures falling. He also lost part of his fortune himself. Austin was therefore looking for a second foothold and began to appear on the radio, first on the program California Melodies , where he worked with the duo Candy and Coco , d. H. the bassist Candy Candido and the guitarist Otto “Coco” Heimel, worked together. Together with them he had his first film appearance in Sadie McKee (1934) on the side of Joan Crawford . Other film appearances followed, for which he often composed songs and also sang himself. Worth mentioning are the films Belle of the Nineties (1934), Klondike Annie (1936) and My Little Chickadee (1940), with his good friend Mae West , who sang some of his titles.

In 1935 Austin bought an empty night club he called My Blue Heaven and turned it into a successful scene hangout. This success led from the fall of 1936 to another permanent engagement on the radio, in the Joe Penner Show on WABC. In the long run, however, the double burden turned out to be too much, so he sold the club to jazz singer Louis Prima , who renamed the club The Famous Door . A little later, however, Austin bought another club, which he in turn called My Blue Heaven .

Another phase in Austin's career began in 1938 when he was offered a role as a singing cowboy . In the mid-1930s, after Gene Autry's first successes in Hollywood, a real boom in musical westerns had broken out, so the various studios tried to send their own representatives into the race. In doing so, they often resorted to established singers who were quickly given a western image. And since Austin had worked as a farrier with horses as a child and had already got to know the songs of the cowboys before, the small Astor Studios chose him. However, “Songs and Saddles” did not run regularly in the cinemas, but only in connection with a tour of the performers, who added a live performance after the screening. Accordingly, the film was released under the Road Show Productions label.

However, the film turned out to be a disappointment. Austin was a gifted singer and also as an actor - especially as a romantic lover - not untalented, but as a cowboy he was completely unbelievable, especially in the action sequences. Reviled by fans and critics alike, it should have been Austin's first and last foray into the genre. Before that, however, he had sold his club in anticipation of a longer-term engagement. However, he had met Billy Wehle on tour , the owner of a tent show, who offered him a collaboration. Against his manager's advice, Austin agreed as it reminded him of happier days. The cooperation did not last long, however, as financial disputes soon arose and there were still open tax claims against Wehle, for which Austin did not want to answer. In his autobiography he describes Wehle's offer as “con”, i.e. H. as a fraud or a fraud.

From the point of view of jazz fans, the founding of the band The Whippoorwills is remarkable about Austin's participation in the tent show . Austin had hired the band The Fidgety Four for the show and renamed them based on the first verse of My Blue Heaven : "When Whippoorwhills call and evening is nigh" . The band members kept this name even after the separation from Austin and continued to play a mixture of jazz, swing and country with a slightly different line-up after the Second World War .

Austin himself went back to New York after his separation from Wehle, but also worked in Washington, DC , where he built another vaudeville show together with the entertainer Ken Murray . Here he worked again with the Whippoorwills and moved tirelessly from performance to performance.

Career end

There was one final high point in Austin's career in the mid-1950s. In 1954 he recorded the album My Blue Heaven for RCA Victor , and in 1957 NBC broadcast the TV film The Gene Austin Story . The specially composed song Too Late was to be his last chart success.

At the end of the 1950s, Austin largely withdrew from show business, and in 1962 he took part in the Democratic Party's primary election for governor of Nevada , albeit without success. In 1966 he married for the fifth and last time. In his new place of residence, Palm Springs , he was active in local committees until 1970 and again ran a club called My Blue Heaven . After his death in 1972, he was buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

Austin and the Crooner

Gene Austin is considered to be the pioneer and trailblazer of crooning . Even if he was not the first crooner in terms of time, his successes laid the foundation for the later mass phenomenon. Many of the typical representatives of the genre such as Bing Crosby , Frank Sinatra or Russ Columbo name it as the inspiration for their style.

In the early 1920s, most of the record stars had vaudeville roots, so they had a rather robust style of singing. In addition, before the introduction of electric microphones in mid-1925, they were forced to sing particularly loudly in order to be heard in the back rows. However, Austin had recognized early on that he could not rival singers like Al Jolson, who was very popular at the time, in terms of vocal power . He therefore decided to try a more reserved singing style, with which Cliff Edwards or Nick Lucas had already had some success.

After most of the studios had introduced the new technology and the new style had established itself, Austin became one of its most outstanding representatives alongside Rudy Vallee . Austin also claims to have been the first artist to use an electric microphone during a live performance after seeing one during a campaign speech by later US President Warren G. Harding .

literature

  • Gene Austin, Ralph M. Pabst: Gene Austin's Ol 'Buddy . Augury Press, 1984 (autobiography).
  • David A. Jasen: Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song . Taylor & Francis, 2003, ISBN 978-0-415-93877-8 , pp. 19 f.
  • Michael R Pitts, Frank W. Hoffmann: The Rise of the Crooners: Gene Austin, Russ Columbo, Bing Crosby, Nick Lucas, Johnny Marvin, and Rudy Vallee . Scarecrow Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-8108-4081-2 , p. 51 ff.

Web links

Commons : Gene Austin  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Norm Cohen, David Cohen: Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong , University of Illinois Press, 2000, p. 615. ISBN 978-0-252-06881-2
  2. Songwriters Hall of Fame ( Memento of the original from June 21, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.songwritershalloffame.org
  3. Kathleen Drowne, Patrick Huber: The 1920's . Greenwood Publishing Group, ISBN 978-0-313-32013-2 , 2004, p. 199.
  4. ^ Songs from the Year 1927
  5. ^ Don Miller, Packy Smith, Ed Hulse: Don Miller's Hollywood Corral: A Comprehensive B-Western Roundup , Riverwood Press, 1993, ISBN 978-1-880756-03-4 , p. 136.