Marion Harris

Marion Harris in 1924

Marion Harris (born April 4, 1896 in Pigeon Township , Vanderburgh County , Indiana as Mary Ellen Harrison , † April 23, 1944 in New York City ) was an American blues , pop and jazz singer .

Live and act

Marion Harris began her career around 1914 as a singer in vaudeville troupes and movie theaters in Chicago . The dancer Vernon Castle introduced her to New York theaters in 1915, where she appeared in Irving Berlin's revue Stop! Look! Lists! debuted.

Victor made her first records in 1916 when she recorded songs like Everybody's Crazy 'bout the Doggone Blues, But I'm Happy , After You've Gone , A Good Man Is Hard to Find and When I Hear that Jazz Band Play . Her biggest success was I Ain't Got Nobody in 1916 .

After the Victor label did not allow her to record WC Handys St. Louis Blues in 1920 , she moved to Columbia , where she had great success with the song. Since she often sang jazz and blues-influenced numbers, she was sometimes called "The Queen of the Blues". Handy wrote about the singer: "She sang the blues so well that people thought the singer was colored". Harris commented: "You usually do best what comes naturally, so I just naturally started singing Southern dialect songs and the modern blues songs."

From 1922 she took on records for the Brunswick label . She continued to appear in Broadway theaters in the 1920s and made regular guest appearances at the Palace Theater , appeared in the Florence Ziegfeld Revue Midnight Frolic and toured the country with vaudeville shows. Marion Harris took several years off after her marriage and looked after her two children; after the divorce in 1927 she appeared again in New York theaters, recorded for Victor and had an appearance in an eight-minute promotional film, Marion Harris, Songbird of Jazz . After participating in an early Hollywood musical ( Devil-May-Care with Ramon Navarro), she stopped performing for a while due to illness.

Between 1931 and 1933 she was on NBC radio shows such as The Ipana Troubadors and Rudy Vallee's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour ; while she was announced by NBC as "The Little Girl with the Big Voice".

At the beginning of 1931 she made a guest appearance in London and had a longer engagement at the Café de Paris . In London she also appeared in the musical Ever Green and on radio broadcasts on the BBC . In the early 1930s, further records were made in England; shortly afterwards she married an English theater agent. Her house was destroyed by the German attack in the Battle of Britain in 1941; In 1944 she returned to New York with a nervous disease. She died two months later in a room fire because she fell asleep smoking in bed.

swell

Will Friedwald: Swinging Voices of America - A Compendium of Great Voices . Hannibal, St. Andrä-Wölker 1992, ISBN 3-85445-075-3 .

Web links

Commons : Marion Harris - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Marion Harris in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Marion Harris at The Jazz Age
Marion Harris at Red Hot Jazz
Collected Works of Marion Harris - Internet Archive

Individual evidence

↑ The original title was I Ain't Got Nobody Much
^ Elijah Wald: Escaping The Delta . Amistad, New York 2005, ISBN 0-0605-2427-8 .
↑ In the original: “she sang blues so well that people hearing her records sometimes thought that the singer was colored.” WC Handy: Father of the Blues . 1941.
↑ 1922 Columbia Records catalog, quoted from: Elijah Ward: Escaping The Delta . Amistad, New York 2005, ISBN 0-0605-2427-8 , p. 283.
↑ Tim Gracyk: The Encyclopedia of Popular American Recording Pioneers: 1895-1925 . Routledge, London / New York 2000, ISBN 0-7890-1220-0 , pp. 167–178, here p. 177 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
^ Marion Harris in the Find a Grave database . Accessed January 31, 2019. ; As you can see, her tombstone gives the wrong year of birth, namely 1906.

personal data
SURNAME	Harris, Marion
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Harrison, Mary Ellen (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American blues, pop and jazz singer
DATE OF BIRTH	April 4, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH	Pigeon Township , Vanderburgh County , Indiana
DATE OF DEATH	April 23, 1944
Place of death	New York City

[1] The original title was I Ain't Got Nobody Much

[2] Elijah Wald: Escaping The Delta . Amistad, New York 2005, ISBN 0-0605-2427-8 .

[3] In the original: “she sang blues so well that people hearing her records sometimes thought that the singer was colored.” WC Handy: Father of the Blues . 1941.

[4] 1922 Columbia Records catalog, quoted from: Elijah Ward: Escaping The Delta . Amistad, New York 2005, ISBN 0-0605-2427-8 , p. 283.

[5] Tim Gracyk: The Encyclopedia of Popular American Recording Pioneers: 1895-1925 . Routledge, London / New York 2000, ISBN 0-7890-1220-0 , pp. 167–178, here p. 177 ( limited preview in the Google book search).

[6] Marion Harris in the Find a Grave database . Accessed January 31, 2019. ; As you can see, her tombstone gives the wrong year of birth, namely 1906.