Mr. B, and his vibrato

Styles of singing change with the public's tastes, a truism since David, et al sang in the Psalms (or, if you're an atheist, since Ann Miller sang "Prehistoric Man").  To this day, I don't know what any red-blooded woman saw in Rudy Vallee or any of his 1920's megaphone-toting crooning clones, but they adored Rudy until Bing Crosby came along and made it cool for manly men to sing like men.

Pardon me for an aside.  Seriously, Google?  The word 'Bing' comes up as a spelling error?  Really? 

Around 1953, when Billy Eckstine slowly fell down the popular music charts he had topped for much of the previous decade, was it because fans were tired of his smoothness?  Did his voice change, as happens to most of us as we get older, and fall out of favor?  Or, as previously noted, did a portion of the public stop buying Mr. B's records because a picture of him being embraced by a white woman, and fawned-over by other white women, was published in a 1950 issue of Life magazine?  One jazz website doesn't mention the photograph, saying Mr. B's style indeed changed.  It was a slight change, but the AllAboutJazz.com claims it was enough to where it caused his popularity to wane.  But is this true?

The biography of Billy Eckstine at All About Jazz hypothesizes on the decline of his record sales.   "By 1950 he was MGM's top-selling artist and was selling out major venues like New York's Paramount Theater. However, unlike Nat ‘King’ Cole who followed him into the pop charts, Eckstine’s singing, especially his exaggerated vibrato, sounded increasingly mannered and he was unable to sustain his recording success throughout the decade." Is this true?  

Answering this question objectively will be tough; I am a devout Mr. B. fan.  I haven't heard any evidence that he went from sexy, velvety tones to the sound of that cartoon where the character's uvula looks like a punching bag.  I am also not a jazz snob - there are plenty of folks who would tell me I have no business judging what's good and what isn't.  Thus, I will try to listen as fairly as possible and do my best to be the man who calls it right down the middle.


First, some early Billy Eckstine, when he first began to ascend the charts, even though it was under the name of someone else's band.  

Mr. Eckstine co-wrote "Stormy Monday Blues" and recorded it with the band of Earl "Fatha" Hines in 1942, just a couple years before Mr. B. started his own orchestra with many of the guys from Hines's band.  Some of Billy's vocal signatures - the bending and shaping of notes, the smooth transitions from the highs to the lows of Mr. B's enormous range, the vibrato - are easily heard.  Billy's style on this record and his other popular recording with the Hines band, Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark", went 'national' during the early 40's thanks to Hines's weekly radio broadcasts from Chicago's Grand Terrace Ballroom. 

Mr B's popularity spiked after he disbanded his own orchestra and went solo, largely due to the ballads that featured his lady-killing vocals.  A string of big singles and sold-out concerts over a four-year span followed, with one of  his last hits coming in 1951, a song that was a blockbuster two decades earlier for another swoon maker; Bing Crosby.

"I Apologize" features the lush string orchestra common to a lot of 1950's hit pop recordings.  As for the vocals, what stands out for me is the way Mr. B treats the letter 'O'.  His enunciation of the word "apologize" and words such as "sorry" and "bottom" have a short 'o' sound elongated just enough to where it sounds like "awww"; "I uh-paww-li-i-gize."  The first time I heard words sung this way was not from Mr. B himself - I had never heard of Billy until eight years ago.  It was from Sammy Davis, Jr., whose signature singer impressions included a good, but comically exaggerated Billy Eckstine (in listening to Mr. Davis's earlier recordings, it's obvious he borrowed heavily from Billy in forming his own singing style).  

Was there a difference between Mr. B's 1942 vocals and those from almost a decade later?  No doubt.  But in 1951, Billy Eckstine was still among the best-selling artists in the country, something that would not be true just a couple years later.  All About Jazz says his vibrato became "more mannered" as the 1950's progressed, so I'd like to listen to a song from later in the decade.  It was a duet with Mr. Eckstine and Sarah Vaughn, one of the best singers in the history of song, and yet it didn't sell much when it was released in 1957.

In Billy's portions of "Passing Strangers", the way he sings, at least to my ear, matches the tone of the song itself.  There is no discernible difference between his vibrato here and that on "I Apologize."  What seems to be clear, based on sales numbers, is that this style of song, at least as performed by Mr. B, had fallen somewhat out of favor with the general public within a few years, though songs in the similar vein continued to sell well for Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra during the late 50's.  

It is also true that Sinatra and Cole were also well known for their up-tempo numbers - they loved to "swing, baby!"  Cole also brought to the table his preeminence as a jazz pianist.  But lest we forget, Mr. B was a pretty fair musician as well.

 

This was part of Billy's appearance on Nat's very last variety show in 1957.  Mr. B could swing, as if his fans didn't know that already.  He proved it again three years later jumping several swingin' songs in one of my favorite Eckstine albums, "No Cover, No Minimum", a live recording of his nightclub act.  Yet much of his recording work of the 1950's wasn't swingin' at all.  Most of his recordings seemed to be the ballads that were his bread and butter in the late 40's and early 50's, and a lot of the public decided it didn't like the bread and butter as much as it used to.  By the time Mr. B truly swung in the recording studio, in a 1959 album with Count Basie, rock and roll had taken over popular music.

I don't think All About Jazz is correct; Mr. B's voice didn't change, at least no more than any other singer's voices altered with age.  Also, in retrospect, the Life photograph should have had a more immediate impact on Mr. Eckstine's career if it were to have an impact at all, and Billy's record sales didn't start to noticeably decline until at least two years after the picture was published.  But 1952 is when Frank Sinatra began his renaissance as a 'swinger'.  Should Mr. B have swung more, a la Sinatra and his "ring-a-ding-ding" resurrection?  He was capable of doing so, but for whatever reason, did not.  Was that his choice?  The choice of his management?  Lots of questions to examine, but we'll do that another day.  For now, one more from Mr. B, one of the best from "No Cover, No Minimum."

Mr. B. and the women

I haven't seen many pictures of Billy Eckstine, but thus far, this is my favorite.  Page 101 of the April 24, 1950 issue of Life Magazine, the de facto official chronicler of America at the time, shows Mr. B. surrounded by women outside the then-famous New York nightclub Bop City.  It shouldn't be shocking; Billy had been a sex symbol since 1939, when his his smooth-as-honey voice became one of the signature instruments in the influential band of piano legend Earl "Fatha" Hines.  But this was 1950, and the women in the photograph are, obviously, persons of pallor while Mr. B. is, as Life described him using then-common condescension, "a personable, 35-year-old Negro baritone."  One young lady has her head on Billy's shoulder, overcome with emotion as she touches the man she obviously, at the time, believes is the most important in the world.  I often wonder if this picture is one of the reasons Mr. B's star, unlike that of some of his contemporaries, seemed to fade just a few years after its peak, his legacy kept alive today only through the diligence of devoted family members and aficionados of jazz and older music.

It's just a picture, but in the context of the times, it is much more.  Really, the photograph is no different than the images shown around the world when another baritone made the leap from "boy singer" in Tommy Dorsey's orchestra to a crazed solo debut at New York's Paramount Theater.  Frank Sinatra's inaugural was marked more by the deafening throngs of teenaged girls, some wetting their seats as they refused to make way for a fresh audience in those days of multiple daily performances, than by the songs he sang.  The same, hydraulically sinking Paramount stage was shown in another picture from the Billy Eckstine Life layout, young women reaching precariously into the pit for a chance to get a finger on Mr. B's impeccably tailored self.  The photos of Mr. Eckstine are virtually identical to those of Sinatra from seven years earlier.  Except, of course, they weren't. Frank J. Roy, Jr. and John H. Edmonson reminded us of that just a few weeks after Life's feature on Mr. B.

On page 14 of Life's May 15, 1950 issue, Mr. Roy, from Columbus, Georgia, writes that he was "disgusted with Life for printing the pictures of Billy Eckstine and his admirers."  Mr. Edmonson, from Fairfield, Alabama - the same Fairfield that gave us Willie Mays, on the cusp of becoming the best baseball player in the world at the time -  told the magazine, "If that was my daughter she would be lucky to be able to sit down in a week when I finished with her."  It appeared that Life thought better than to print the rest of Mr. Edmonson's letter, presumably because it would be another 40 or 50 years before respectable magazines published such words.

Sure, moms and dads made similar complaints about Sinatra and, in the decades that followed, Elvis and the Beatles.  But given that Mr. Roy and Mr. Edmonson lived in the deep South, their points were clear; no (white) daughter of theirs would be caught placing their heads, hands, or anything else on a (n-word).  To be fair to the South, there were plenty of people in other parts of 1950 America who likely felt the same way. Were those the people who, barely three years after he belted out hit after hit before thousands of delirious "Billysoxers", would virtually knock William Clarence Eckstine off the Billboard hit music charts?

Having devoted white female fans never seemed to affect the popularity of Billy's African-American contemporary, Nat King Cole.  Nat was openly marketed throughout the 1950's by Capitol Records as a way to get your woman to snuggle closer, regardless of the color of your skin.  Nat was not immune to racism - in '56, he was attacked on stage in his native Alabama by a couple of nut jobs.  But enough of white America loved him so much, he was given his own TV variety show, though that show would eventually be brought down by the race card played by sponsors who refused to sign on (one of the guests on Nat's very last TV show; Billy Eckstine).  Nat even had a somewhat-publicized affair with Swedish actress Gunilla Hutton of "Hee Haw" fame, but that dalliance was overshadowed by his death, which came just weeks after he ended the affair.

White women had swooned to Mr. B. at least since he became the first person to sing Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael's 1941 masterpiece "Skylark" on the radio.  They, and lots of other folks of all colors, bought his records in droves, particularly the ballads highlighted by, as Life called them, his "gooey" vocals.  Then, around 1952 or '53, though he continued recording and performing for much of the remaining 40 years of his life, his songs didn't seem to be en vogue anymore.  Billy Eckstine's star did not ascend in the '50's like that of Cole or Tony Bennett or a resurgent Sinatra.  What happened?  Did Mr. B. start singing the wrong songs or did he start singing differently?  Did the arrangements of those songs not change with the era's musical tastes?  Perhaps one of those answers is correct.

Or perhaps the answer, at least in part, is that a picture of a young white woman with her head resting on the shoulder of a black man was published in one of America's biggest magazines in an era when that was taboo.  There were, to my knowledge, no such pictures of Mr. Cole.

How a Skylark And a (Mr.) B Broke Down a Barrier

When Bix Beiderbecke, who made more beautiful sounds emanate from brass instruments than perhaps any other human, died at 28 from an overdose of degenerate behavior, no one would have guessed that his passing would eventually help tear down a wall of musical racial separation. Even more unlikely was that help in bringing down that wall came from a guy from segregated Savannah, Georgia and a guy from Indiana, home of the modern Ku Klux Klan, or that the voice which blasted the wall away had bi-racial grandparents native to the bigoted nation's capitol.

Bix, self-taught cornet king back when most everyone could distinguish the mellow cornet from louder cousin trumpet, was the idol of many musicians in the 1920's. One idol who got the chance to play alongside Bix was young Hoagy Carmichael, recent graduate of his hometown Indiana University law school. No matter how badly Bix treated himself - the human body was not designed to consume even half of the notoriously nasty Prohibition bootleg gin Bix supposedly ingested - Hoagy was naturally enthralled by the chance to play alongside God. He was so hooked that two of Mr. Carmichael's prized possessions had some Bix in them; Hoagy's first child, a son (luckily) named Hoagy Bix, and a cornet mouthpiece that once belonged to the king himself. The mouthpiece was a mainstay of Hoagy's suit pocket until Mr. Carmichael passed it on to a lyricist, a younger fan of Bix with whom Hoagy occasionally worked - John Herndon Mercer.

Between the first time he worked with Johnny in 1933 and when they would come together again around 1940, Mr. Carmichael wrote some melodies based on Bix's solos - or perhaps they were actual Bix solos as eminent jazz biographer Gene Lees once suggested - in hopes of making a Broadway musical about Bix. When it didn't happen, Hoagy gave one of the melodies to Mr. Mercer to write a lyric for it. It only took John almost a year. Mr. Mercer, sometimes ready with a lyric in as little as half-an-hour, struggled with the melody so much that Hoagy later claimed he had forgotten about it when, one day out of the blue, Mercer presented him with "Skylark."

It was kind of a big deal, big enough to be on the Billboard pop charts four times under four different artists....in 1942 alone, with three of those in one month! Glenn Miller (with Ray Eberle on vocals), Harry James (w/Helen Forrest), and Dinah Shore were all on the same Billboard chart with the exact same song in May of '42. Bing Crosby (of course) would have a hit with it two months later. But before fans bought copies of those records, something happened with "Skylark" that perhaps had never before occurred; it's inaugural to the white entertainment world over the radio was given by black artists, among them Billy Eckstine.

Mr. B., he of the mixed-race background, began singing with the man many consider the first modern jazz pianist, Earl "Fatha" Hines, in 1939. By then, Hines and his orchestra were household names among white and black audiences thanks to an eleven-year run as "the most broadcast band in America" from their home base, the Grand Terrace Ballroom of the Al Capone-controlled Sunset Cafe in Chicago. It was no longer the Grand Terrace Orchestra after 1940; Hines thought he was underpaid and could say so aloud without fear of bullets now that Capone was long gone. Still, the Hines band could easily get a radio gig, and during one particular gig on the air in '42, they appear to have been the first band to play the latest Carmichael/Mercer tune into the ether, likely the first time a black singer and band debuted a mainstream (meaning white) pop song on the radio.

It isn't known whether a recording of that radio performance exists, but the Hines band's studio recording of "Skylark" was just as "sweet" and had just as much of a pop feel as the Glenn Miller version. As Mr. Eckstine crooned the lyric, he was even accompanied by an apparent "skylark", a very un-Hines-like flute for crying out loud, half a decade before flute tweets helped carry Nat King Cole through "Nature Boy." The mellow sax solo during the bridge wasn't as jazzy as Harry James's treatment of the "Skylark" melody with his muted trumpet. In other words, it wasn't exactly the best version of the song. But it was solid, and it helped cement Mr. B. as the "Sepia Sinatra", a ridiculous racial moniker common to the era no doubt. There is also no doubt that a lot of women began swooning to Billy Eckstine during the war.

Hines and Eckstine's recording of "Skylark" didn't sell as well as those of their white contemporaries - their big hit song of '42 was their own composition "Stormy Monday Blues", number one on Billboard's new Harlem Hit Parade, the non-P.C. precursor to the R&B chart. But Fatha and Mr. B. proved to Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, and other songwriters that you didn't need Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman, or other performers of pallor premiere your song on the radio to grab an audience's attention. Nat Cole is remembered by most as the first black pop singer with mass appeal among white and black fans. Record sales numbers these days may reflect that, but I think Nat himself would remind us that Billy Eckstine beat him by a few years, with some help from Mr. Mercer and Mr. Carmichael and Mr. Bix.