Alberta Hunter

One of the seminal blues and cabaret singers, Alberta Hunter (1895-1984) gained international fame in the first half of the 20th century as a recording artist and nightclub and stage performer. Many of her recordings are considered classics and her accompanists were some of the greatest jazz musicians of the era. Hunter actually had two careers as a singer; during the 20-year interlude that separated them, this strong-willed and independent-minded woman worked as a nurse in New York City.

Hunter was born on April 1, 1895, in Memphis, Tennessee, and named for the doctor who delivered her. Her father, a railroad porter, abandoned the family while she was a young girl, though for years Hunter repeated the story that he had died while she was a child. Her mother eventually remarried, but Hunter did not get along with her new family and ran away from home. The exact date when this occurred has been lost, but most accounts say she was either 11 or 12 years old.

Early Success in Chicago

Hunter went to Chicago where she found work in a boarding house - her pay included room, board, and $6 a week. Captivated by Chicago's nightlife, she began sneaking into clubs. Her professional debut came in 1911 when she sang in a club in Chicago's Southside called Dago Frank's, a shady place that was a hangout for underworld characters. Hunter remained there for two years and left only after the club was closed down. Her mother joined her in Chicago soon after.

Hunter's first big connection in the music business came when she started singing in another Southside nightclub, the Elite Café. There she met ragtime pianist and songwriter Tony Jackson. Among the songs Jackson wrote was "Pretty Baby," which Hunter helped popularize. Over the next few years Hunter sang in a string of Southside Chicago nightclubs including the Panama Café, which catered to whites; the De Luxe Café; and, beginning in 1917, the fabled Dreamland Café where she established herself as one of Chicago's top blues singers. At the Dreamland she became friends with the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band, which featured Joe "King" Oliver on cornet and a young Louis Armstrong on second cornet. Hunter was especially friendly with Lil Hardin, Oliver's pianist and Louis Armstrong's first wife. Three years younger than Hunter, Hardin was also from Memphis. The Dreamland Café also drew an elite white and African American clientele; it was where Hunter first met Paul Robeson, with whom years later she would star in Showboat in London. Other patrons included Al Jolson and Bix Beiderbecke. On her off days and after hours Hunter worked as what was then known as a "drop-in girl," making the rounds of other nightclubs.

By 1919 Hunter was a celebrity in Chicago and began paying more attention to her image, including the rumor that she was a lesbian. In that era few performers were openly homosexual (especially blues singers, who flaunted heterosexuality) and Hunter was no exception. In January she sang at a club in Cincinnati where one of the young waiters caught her eye, an army veteran named Willard Saxby Townsend. Hunter and Townsend were married in Covington, Kentucky, on January 27, 1919, but by all accounts their marriage was never consummated. Two months after they returned to Chicago Townsend filed for divorce, which was granted in March 1923. By then Hunter was living in New York with the love of her life Lottie Tyler, niece of the African American vaudeville comedian, Bert Williams.

In the early 1920s Hunter was the queen of the Dreamland Café and indeed of the Chicago blues scene. Back then Chicago was the place to be as far as jazz and blues musicians were concerned. As Hunter herself said of the era as quoted by Frank C. Taylor and Gerald Cook in Alberta Hunter: A Celebration in Blues: "If you had worked in Chicago and had been recognized there, you were somebody, baby. New York didn't count then."

Whether it counted or not, Hunter was soon traveling to New York to record for a label called Black Swan records. Her earliest recordings, in May 1921, were "He's a Darned Good Man to Have Around" backed by "How Long, Sweet Daddy, How Long," "Bring Back the Joys," and "Some Day Sweetheart." On all of these, Fletcher Henderson accompanied her on piano (though the identities of the other musicians have been lost). During the next two years Hunter traveled back and forth between her performing base in Chicago and her recording base in New York. In July 1922 she recorded a slew of songs for the Paramount label, including the now-classic "Down Hearted Blues," which Hunter cowrote with pianist Lovie Austin, "Daddy Blues," and accompanied by Eubie Blake on piano, "Jazzin' Baby Blues." The next year Bessie Smith recorded "Down Hearted Blues" for Columbia Records and it became that label's first hit. Hunter, however, received very little in royalty payments - and only from Paramount. In February 1923 Hunter broke ground when she became the first African American singer to be back by an all-white band - the Original Memphis Five. Among the three songs they recorded that month was "Tain't Nobody's Biz-ness If I Do." In all Hunter recorded 14 songs in the month of February 1923 alone (the other songs were backed by Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra), all for Paramount Records. With so much recording activity, not to mention Broadway, the lure of New York became stronger and stronger for Hunter and she finally moved there in April 1923.

She was not without a job for long. On April 18 she joined the cast of the musical How Come? and was an immediate (and literal) "showstopper." Her singing and glamour (Hunter always appeared onstage in beautiful dresses) captured the sophisticated Broadway audience. Unfortunately most critics found little else to praise in How Come? and the show closed after five weeks. Meanwhile Hunter continued recording for Paramount. In May and June 1923 she cut "Stingeree Blues" and "You Can't Do What My Last Man Did," with piano accompaniment on both songs by Fats Waller.

In 1924 Hunter, feeling slighted by Paramount, recorded five songs on the Gennett label using the name Josephine Beatty. This was a technical violation of her contract with Paramount, and as a result she lost her contract at the end of the year. The five Gennett songs became minor cult classics as Hunter was backed up by the Red Onion Jazz Babies, featuring Louis Armstrong on cornet. The following year she began recording with Okeh Records and stayed with them through 1926; she also decided to hit the vaudeville circuit. Upon returning to New York from her vaudeville tour Hunter bought an apartment on West 138th Street, which placed her both professionally and personally in the midst of the famed Harlem Renaissance.

At the end of 1926 Hunter recorded three songs for a Chicago record company, Vocalion, but they were never released. In 1927 she left Okeh to record for Victor. Among the seven Victor recordings she made that year was "Beale Street Blues," with Fats Waller on pipe organ.

Paris and London

New York was home, but Hunter was a traveling woman by nature, and in August 1927 she and Tyler embarked for Paris, where Josephine Baker was already a star. It was an opportunity to escape American racism and become recognized for her talent that Hunter could not pass up. As quoted in Alberta Hunter: A Celebration in Blues she said, "The Negro [sic] artists went to Europe because we were recognized and given a chance. In Europe they had your name up in lights. People in the United States would not give us that chance."

In Paris Hunter's name was indeed up in lights, and she moved in the expatriate high cultural circles of the era. She also published letters in the Amsterdam News, New York's most prominent African American newspaper, detailing her Parisian life, serving more or less as a correspondent. However Paris was also where she broke up with Tyler, though they remained good friends afterward. In January 1928, without Tyler who had returned to the United States, Hunter left Paris for London.

Her first professional appearance in London, two days after she arrived, was at the London Pavilion located at Picadilly Circus. Her biggest triumph of her European "tour" came in May 1928 when she performed the role of Queenie in the London stage version of Showboat, which also featured Paul Robeson. The musical closed after three months, but Hunter remained in London until March 1929. After a brief return to Paris to open the Paris Cotton Club she returned to the United States in May 1929. Back in the U.S. she cut two more songs, this time for Columbia Records. These were her only recordings until 1934 when she recorded 12 songs in London that were released on the HMV (His Master's Voice) label.

If she had thought her unqualified success in Paris and London would be enough to open doors in the United States she was mistaken. Other than some vaudeville work, a role in a musical called Change Your Luck, and a revue titled This Way Out (in which she appeared only for a week and was never paid), Hunter found work hard to come by. There were a few bookings in Harlem's Alhambra Theatre. By 1933 things had got so bad for her - the Great Depression having exacerbated the already hard-to-come-by bookings - that she decided to return to Paris. This time her success was a bit qualified - the economic depression was keeping people away from the nightclubs. In the spring of 1934 she went to Copenhagen, Denmark, where the reception given her by the public was even warmer than that of the French.

In July 1934 Hunter was back in London, and she effortlessly picked up where she had left off five years earlier. She toured the British and Scottish music hall circuit and recorded 12 songs including "I Travel Alone," written by Noel Coward. Originally recorded for HMV, they were later released as an LP, The Legendary Alberta Hunter: The London Sessions-1934. She also appeared in the first British film shot in color, Radio Parade of 1935. In January 1935 her British work permit was not renewed and after a brief return to Paris, Hunter returned to the United States. In 1937 following another sojourn abroad, which took her not only to Europe but Egypt as well, Hunter began singing on NBC radio. Her contract expired in early 1938, whereupon she returned to Europe. With war becoming more of a likelihood, Hunter returned to New York in the fall of 1938 and resumed her radio singing. When war did break out and Paris fell to the Nazis African American entertainers returned to New York, making competition for jobs that much stiffer. Adding to this was the next generation of singers led by Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, and Lena Horne.

By then Hunter's recording career had cooled off somewhat. In 1935 she recorded four songs for the American Record Company, which the company never released. In 1939 she recorded six songs for Decca, including another version of "Down Hearted Blues." In 1940 she recorded four songs for Bluebird, accompanied by Eddie Heywood Jr. on piano. These were her last recordings until after the war.

USO Entertainer

During the World War II, Hunter entertained troops as a member of the United Service Organizations (USO). She did various tours in the Pacific (where she experienced an air raid) and European theaters, entertaining General Eisenhower, Field Marshal Montgomery, and Marshal Zhukov. She continued entertaining troops during peacetime and later toured again with the USO during the Korean War (1950-1953). During the postwar years she also continued performing in clubs and shows.

Hunter resumed her recording career in 1946 with two small companies: Juke Box, for whom she recorded two songs, and Stash, recording just one song. In 1950 she recorded on Regal and in 1952 she cut two songs for Wheeler and four songs for Prestige/Bluesville, but her career was obviously slowing down. Never the Broadway star she had hoped to become when she moved to New York, she appeared in a number of revues and plays into the mid-1950s, but work was sporadic and when one play in particular, Debut, closed after four days on Broadway she decided to call it a career. Or rather, she decided to change careers.

Other Careers

On August 14, 1956, Alberta Hunter graduated from the Harlem YWCA nursing school and became a licensed practical nurse. She had lied about her age to get into the school, declaring that she was twelve years younger than she was, thus coming full circle from her earliest Chicago days when she had pretended to be older to sneak into clubs. She worked as a nurse for more than twenty years and retired in 1977 at what officials thought was the mandatory retirement age of 70; she was 82 years old. The only nod Hunter gave to her performing career during her years as a nurse was in 1961 when one of her old accompanists and songwriting partner, Lovie Austin, talked her into recording an LP for the Riverside label tiled, Alberta Hunter with Lovie Ausin's Blues Seranaders. The songs included "Down Hearted Blues," "Moanin' Low," "Streets Paved with Gold," and "St. Louis Blues."

After retiring as a nurse Hunter effortlessly resumed her career as a New York cabaret singer and recording artist. This second career made her a bigger star than she had previously been. In 1977 she was performing at the Cookery in New York's Greenwich Village. By the end of the year she had a recording contract with Columbia Records and had recorded the LP Remember My Name, the soundtrack of the film of the same name. Hunter played Carnegie Hall on June 27, 1978, and also gave command performance for the Carter White House. In 1979 she recorded the album Amtrak Blues. She followed this up in 1981 with The Glory of Alberta Hunter and in 1983 completed Look for the Silver Lining . Alberta Hunter died on October 17, 1984, in New York City.

Books

Taylor, Frank C. and Gerald Cook, Alberta: A Celebration in Blues, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1987.

Periodicals

New York Times, October 19, 1984.

Online

"Alberta Hunter," http://www.redhotjazz.com/Hunter.html (January 27, 2003).

blues singer; songwriter; nurse

Personal Information

Born on April 1, 1895, in Memphis, TN; died on October 17, 1984, in New York, NY; daughter of Charles E. Hunter and Laura Peterson Hunter; married Willard Townsend, 1919 (divorced).

Career

Blues singer, 1911-57, 1977-84; nurse, 1957-77.

Life's Work

Alberta Hunter was an early blues singer who had a tremendous influence on the blues and jazz music of the times. Her musical career spanned almost the entire twentieth century. Even at a young age, her singing influenced such greats as Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker. She sang and wrote classic blues and helped bridge the gap to cabaret pop music. In her lifetime she had three distinct successful careers, starting the second one at an age when people normally start retirement. After spending twenty years as a nurse, Hunter made an astonishing comeback in 1977 at the age of 82. Her work and her contributions to blues singing remained popular and her albums still sold in the twenty-first century, years after her death. In his full length biography of Hunter, Frank C. Taylor said "From a background of poverty, discrimination, and little formal education, she propelled herself in the 1910s and 1920s to the top of the entertainment world, performing at Chicago's Dreamland Café, on Broadway, at the Drury Lane in London, and in sophisticated cabarets from Cairo to Copenhagen."

Music Forged in Early Childhood Traumas

It has been said that to write and sing the blues, you need to live the blues. Alberta Hunter was born on April 1, 1895, in Memphis, Tennessee. Her father, Charles E. Hunter, was a sleeping-car porter on a railroad. He abandoned the family soon after Hunter was born. Her mother, Laura Peterson Hunter, worked as a maid in a brothel just to support her family. Hunter had one sister, La Tosca, who was two years older. Mrs. Hunter was ashamed of her job and the fact that her husband had left. She told the girls he had died and never discussed her job, her feelings, sex, or relationships with men with them. Hunter was very ill prepared when she was later sexually abused by both a boyfriend of their landlady and her school principal. These traumas and what she probably observed in the brothel were the start of her issues with men and her becoming a lesbian in later life and gave her a background that the blues could pour out of.

Hunter spent her early years between her strict disciplinarian mother, who taught her to be self reliant and respect herself, and her grandmother, Nancy Peterson, who saw in the young Hunter the potential and the wanderlust. Her early music education came from her exposure to the blues bands of Beale Street. When W.C. Handy came to Memphis with his blues band in 1905, Hunter would race down to hear the band play. Her mother remarried when Hunter was eleven and had another child, Josephine. Hunter, always a serious child, got less attention at home and started having more problems with boys and men outside of her home. At sixteen, she ran away with a family friend to Chicago where another friend got her a job peeling potatoes in a boarding house for $6 a week. Her ambition was to make big money ($10 a week) singing. Of her blues career, Hunter is quoted in the Calliope on-line article as having said "The blues? Why, the blues are a part of me ... When we sing blues, we're singing out our hearts, we're singing out our feelings. When I sing ... what I'm doing is letting my soul out."

Through perseverance, Hunter finally persuaded the owners of Dago Frank's to allow her to sing to their customers. Dago Frank's was one of Chicago's wilder whorehouses at the time. There she was much influenced by the women who protected her and separated her from the pimps and the customers. She started singing with a repertoire of two songs which she had taught herself after she convinced the owners to give her the job. Ever a loving daughter, she sent part of her money back to her mother each week. She worked there until 1913 when the house closed. She then moved to a job at a club called Hugh Hoskin's, where she was introduced to a clientele of some of Chicago's leading black pick-pockets and confidence men. By this time, her mother had separated from her husband and came to live with Hunter in Chicago. The two developed a firm "Don't ask, don't tell" relationship, not discussing Hunter's growing lesbianism or her mother's marital problems.

Singing Career Expanded

From there, Hunter's career advanced, with her getting jobs in several black clubs. In 1915 she was hired by the Panama Café, one of Chicago's top spots with a largely white clientele. She became immensely popular, even to the point that some composers paid her to introduce their songs. Among the most interesting were when W.C. Handy asking her to plug "Saint Louis Blues," and she was one of the first to sing "Sweet Georgia Brown" for Maceo Walker. When the Panama Café closed because of a shooting in 1917, Hunter moved around a bit and then was hired by the Dreamland Ballroom. She spent five years there singing with Joseph "King" Oliver and his band. Her salary started at $17.50 a week, rising to $35. She also got tip money which could reach four or five hundred dollars on a good night. Interestingly, with her background, she could manage to get more than her share of the tips, which were supposed to be shared equally among the musicians. She would do such things as stuff money down the front of her dress or specially flirt with a particular customer. Once when the lights went out and a man was shot in a club she was working, she was caught with her hand in the tip jar when the lights came back on. She never lost the lessons she learned early.

As Hunter continued her career, she sang in as many clubs as possible, often after hours or during her free time. She met and worked with some of the most talented musicians in the world. In a world of excesses, however, she stayed on the outside because of her reserved nature and the fact that she didn't drink, smoke, or take drugs. She made it a point to restrict the lyrics in her songs--she capitalized on the suggestive and strictly avoided the explicit.

In Cincinnati in 1919 she met Willard Townsend, a handsome young waiter in one of the clubs she was working. They crossed over to Kentucky one night and got married, at least in part to stop the rumors about her lesbianism. The marriage was a disaster from the start. They returned to Chicago where they lived together for only two months. Hunter kicked him out and returned to her career, divorcing him four years later.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Hunter's career took off. She traveled a lot between Chicago and New York, meeting and performing with greats such as Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechel, Fats Waller, Sophie Tucker, and Bessie Smith. She had wonderful style. She only appeared in the latest fashions and had a sparkling personality when she performed. In New York, she recorded first for the Black Swan label, switching to Paramount in 1922. She wrote most of the songs she recorded for Paramount, performing some of her best material, including "Down Hearted Blues," "You Shall Reap What You Sow," and "Chirping The Blues." At this time she also started landing roles on and off Broadway. In 1922, she starred with Ethel Waters in Dumb Luck, which closed out of town stranding the cast until Hunter found the money to get them home. In April of 1923 after a conflict with her current friend's boyfriend, she moved to New York. Four days later, she opened in Eddie Hunter's How Come? at the Apollo Theatre. One of her songs, "Down Hearted Blues," became a hit recording when Bessie Smith sang it. Ironically, as was often true for black composers of the time, Hunter received very little money from the hit. However, this review gained her much deserved recognition in New York and helped establish her career as a cabaret singer. In 1924 she was in Washington at the Howard Theatre, performing in Eddie Hunter's Struttin' Time. Besides singing and writing music, Hunter could also dance and is credited with teaching the Charleston to the white folks of West Virginia. She may actually have invented the black bottom, another dance craze of the 1920s.

Traveled and Performed Extensively

She was an active and industrious performer, often singing at several clubs or shows at the same time. She did several recordings under different names, recording for the Biltmore label as Alberta Prime, the Gennett label as Josephine Beatty, and the OKeh, Victor, and Columbia labels as Alberta Hunter.

In the 1920s Hunter performed in vaudeville on the Keith circuit. Vaudeville of this time was not very kind to black performers, expecting them to perform stereotypical roles in overalls and tattered dresses. By the late 1920s, Hunter felt she had done as much as she could in the New York scene and set sail with her companion, Lottie Tyler, for Europe. Here she was met with open arms. She knew enough of the right people that she was invited to fashionable parties and she openly enjoyed the lack of prejudice against blacks in the Europe of that time. She started working in France, first in a Paris club and then later on the Riviera. She was a great success. When her work permit for England came through in early 1928, she moved to London where she performed in a myriad of clubs. In May she opened in the part of Queenie in Show Boat also starring Paul Robeson. A great success, the show ran for 350 performances.

In May of 1929 she returned to the states, and although she had achieved star status in Europe, still had problems with her career at home. She worked both in Chicago and New York at various clubs, did some more vaudeville and opened in a few plays--none of which were very popular. In 1930 Hunter moved her mother into her apartment in Harlem where she was to stay until she died, cooking and keeping house for her daughter. She spent a lot of the 1930s traveling back and forth to Europe and Asia, performing in England and France as well as the Middle East and Russia. She did several command performances before royalty and was very popular. She returned home reluctantly when the State department brought home all American citizens because of the pending war.

During World War II, she joined the USO and entertained troops all over Europe, India, China, and other countries. The highlight of the tour was a performance on June 11 for General Eisenhower and Soviet Marshall Zhukov to celebrate victory in Europe. She continued her work with the USO, touring war torn Europe and later performing in the Korean War zone. She was one of 40 recipients of the Asiatic Pacific Campaign Ribbon for "Outstanding Service" for her extensive work with the troops.

Returning to Music After Nursing

Back in New York in the early 1950s, Hunter again started performing at clubs and in plays, but her career was waning. She joined a church and started doing volunteer work at the Joint Diseases Hospital in Harlem and was named Volunteer of the Year in 1956. She was devastated by the death of her mother in 1954. She realized that she needed to do something else with her life and at the age of 62 when most people are retiring, she studied to pass her elementary school equivalency exam, subtracted 12 years from her age, and received her practical nurses license in August of 1957. During the 20 years she worked as a nurse, she maintained only casual relationships with her prior life, recording only a few songs and taping interviews for the Smithsonian Institute. Hunter was an excellent nurse and well liked by her patients. She probably would not have retired if she had not been forced into it by the hospital who thought she had reached the mandatory retirement age of 70. She was actually 82.

In 1977 she was invited by Barney Josephson, the owner of New York's popular jazz club the Cookery, to sing as long as she still had all of her teeth so that she wouldn't whistle into the microphone. She was an instant success. The National Review said in her obituary "friends persuaded her to perform again in a Manhattan restaurant, the Cookery, and she did so to terrific reviews. Pretty soon you couldn't get into the place with a drill bit. She was spunky, and smooth ..." She was back in her glory with audiences in the palm of her hand and a better attitude about female black singers. She was invited to sing at Carnegie Hall and for President Jimmy Carter at the White House. During this time, she also recorded two new albums which included some of her favorite songs, Amtrak Blues in 1980 and Look for the Silver Lining in 1983. She made many appearances on television and sang at the Kennedy Center Lifetime Award program honoring, among others, Marian Anderson.

By 1980 health problems started to plague Hunter. She broke several bones at different times and had a pacemaker installed during one hospital stay. She continued performing almost to the end. She was performing in Denver in the summer of 1984 when she finally decided that she could not continue and returned to her apartment in New York. She died on October 17, 1984. She received awards from the city of Memphis "for her immense contribution to the development of an important art form, the blues," and the Handy Award as Traditional Female Blues Artist of the Year. Her music and contributions to the blues and jazz movements in America will be long remembered.

Awards

Asiatic Pacific Campaign Ribbon for Outstanding Service; City of Memphis Award for her immense contributions to the blues; Handy Award as Traditional Female Artist of the Year.

Works

Selected works

Albums

• Young Alberta Hunter: The Twenties, Stash.
• Classic Alberta Hunter: The Thirties, Stash.
• The Legendary Alberta Hunter: The London Sessions--1934, DRG.
• Songs We Taught Your Mother, Prestige/Bluesville.
• Alberta Hunter with Lovie Austin's Blues Serenaders, Riverside.
• Remember My Name (original sound track recording), Juke Box.
• Amtrak Blues, Columbia.
• The Glory of Alberta Hunter, Columbia.
• Look for the Silver Lining, Columbia.

Singles

• Bring Back the Joys, Black Swan, 1921.
• After All These Tears, Paramount, 1922.
• Chirping The Blues, Paramount, 1922.
• Down Hearted Blues, Paramount, 1922.
• Bleeding Heart Blues, Paramount, 1923.
• Old Fashioned Love, Paramount, 1924.
• Wasn't It Nice, OKeh, 1926.
• Beale Street Blues, Victor, 1927.
• Gimmie All the Love You Got, Columbia, 1929.
• Second Hand Man, ARC, 1935.
• You Can't Tell the Difference After Dark, ARC, 1935.
• Boogie Woogie Swing, Bluebird, 1940.

Other

• Alberta Hunter: Jazz at the Smithsonian (video), Sony Corporation, 1982.

Further Reading

Books

• Harris, Sheldon, Blues Who's Who: a Biographical Dictionary of Blues Singers, Arlington House, New Rochelle, NY, 1979.
• Harrison, Daphne, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1988.
• Santelli, Robert, The Big Book of Blues, Penguin Books, New York, 1993.
• Taylor, Frank C., with Gerald Cook, Alberta Hunter, A Celebration in Blues, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1987.

Periodicals

• National Review, November 30, 1984, p. 18.
• USA Today, September 1993, p. 97.

On-line

• "Alberta Hunter," Red Hot Jazz, www.redhotjazz.com/hunter.html (September 26, 2003).
• "The Classic Blues and the Women Who Sang Them," Calliope Film Resources, www.calliope.org/blues/blues1.html (September 26, 2003).

— Patricia A. Donaldson

See Alberta Hunter Lyrics

• Born: April 01, 1895, Memphis, TN
• Died: October 17, 1984, Roosevelt, NY
• Active: '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s
• Genres: Blues
• Instrument: Vocals
• Representative Albums: "Young Alberta Hunter: The 20's and 30's," "The Glory of Alberta Hunter," "Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 4 (1927-46)"
• Representative Songs: "Downhearted Blues," "My Castle's Rockin'," "The Love I Have for You"

Biography

Alberta Hunter was a pioneering African-American popular singer whose path crosses the streams of jazz, blues and pop music. While she made important contributions to all of these stylistic genres, she is claimed exclusively by no single mode of endeavor. Hunter recorded in six decades of the twentieth century, and enjoyed a career in music that outlasted most human lives.

Hunter was born in Memphis, and depending on which account you read, she either ran away from home or her family relocated to Chicago when she was 12-years-old. Her career began in the bawdy houses on the south side of Chicago, probably in 1911 or 1912, although she claimed 1909. Early on she married, but ultimately discovered she preferred women to men. In Chicago Hunter worked with legendary pianist Tony Jackson, was good friends with King Oliver's pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, and even sang in white clubs. But working in these violent, rough-and-tumble nighteries was dangerous business, and not long after an incident where Hunter's piano accompanist was killed by a stray bullet, she decided to try her talent in New York.

Not long after she arrived, Hunter made contact with the Harry Pace and his Black Swan Records concern. Hunter's initial records for Black Swan, made in May 1921, were the first blues vocals recorded by the company. Later, after Paramount acquired Black Swan, these sides were co-mingled with Hunter's newer Paramount recordings; her work from both labels dominated the early couplings in the Paramount 12000 Race series. Her recordings were also pressed up for labels like Puritan, Harmograph, and Silvertone under pseudonyms such as Josephine Beatty, Alberta Prime, Anna Jones, and even May Alix, the name of another (incidentally inferior) real live singer!

Although some listeners accustomed to her voice on her post-1977 recordings have little or no use for these early waxes, Hunter contributed positively to some very important sessions. These include a 1923 Paramount date where she was accompanied by a white group, the Original Memphis Five, said to be the first session of its kind; the famous Red Onion Jazz Babies session for Gennett-Champion's New York studio with Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet that produced "Cake Walking Babies from Home" and the vocal version of "Texas Moaner Blues"; many sessions backed by Fletcher Henderson's earliest orchestra, and some others where she was supported by Fats Waller, Eubie Blake, Lovie Austin, and Tommy Ladnier. Altogether, Hunter made more than 80 sides before 1930, most of them being made before 1925. A (rumored) rejected 1926 date for Vocalion teamed her with King Oliver, Lil Armstrong, and Johnny Dodds, but nothing concrete about this session has ever surfaced, and certainly no recordings of it.

During the '20s, Hunter also established herself as a songwriter of some significance; her song "Downhearted Blues" was covered by Bessie Smith on her first recording for Columbia -- it was a huge hit for Smith. Hunter was able to break easily into the black vaudeville circuit and by 1927 she was off to Europe for an extended stay which would keep her out of the U.S. for most of the depression. In London in 1934, Hunter made an extensive series of recordings with an orchestra led by Jack Jackson, some of these being straight-up pop records with no pretension of being blues or jazz. Returning to the U.S. in 1935, Hunter still found an audience waiting for her, but record dates were getting harder to come by. She made sessions with ARC, Bluebird, and Decca, but these generated no hits, and some weren't even released. Hunter ultimately wound up working for fly-by-night indies such as Regal and Juke Box in the '40s. Unfazed, Hunter worked the USO circuit during World War II and still had considerable drawing power in terms of personal appearances. There are those who insist that her recordings are nothing but a weak imitation of the real thing, and that it was Alberta Hunter the "live" performer that kept her fan base active during these years.

Hunter dropped out of show business for two decades starting in 1956 in favor of working as a licensed practical nurse at a hospital in the New York City area. She broke from this routine only once, in 1961, in order to make a justly celebrated album for Bluesville which reunited her with her old friends Lovie Austin and Lil Hardin Armstrong. None of her patients or co-workers at the hospital had any idea who she was or what a famous name she had been, and Hunter preferred it that way.

When Hunter retired from nursing in 1977, she was 81 and ready to go back on the road. By this time her voice was gritty, down and dirty, and her fans loved her for it. She made four albums for Columbia between 1977 and her death in 1984, including the extraordinary Amtrak Blues, and for many younger listeners these are the records by which Alberta Hunter is defined. Oddly, these same fans have little patience for her sweet and precious singing in the '20s, and relatively few outside of England would have much tolerance for her '30s work with Jack Jackson. Nonetheless, all of Hunter's recordings are interesting and wonderful in their own way.

Alberta Hunter was one of the earliest African-American singers, along with Sippie Wallace, to make the transition from the lowly brothels and sporting houses into the international spotlight. That she defies easy categorization attests to the astonishing fact that she was on the scene a little before the genres themselves were defined. Her longevity as a popular artist is equaled by only a few others, and she was successful in adapting her style to changes in popular taste, as well as along the lines of her own personal experiences. ~ Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide

My Castle's Rockin' [Video] Buy this CD	Alternate Takes (1921-1924) Buy this CD	Tell the Difference Buy this CD	Jazz Masters Series: Alberta Hunter [DVD] Buy this CD	Beale Street Blues: 1921-1940 Buy this CD
Downhearted Blues Buy this CD	Songs We Taught Your Mother Buy this CD	Chicago: The Living Legends Buy this CD	Legendary Alberta Hunter: '34 London Sessions Buy this CD	Amtrak Blues Buy this CD

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