Runnin' Wild, Rose of the Rio Grande, St. Louis Blues, You've Got to See Mama Every Night, Tea For Two, I'll See You In My Dreams, A Good Man is Hard to Find, It Had to Be You, Haunting Blues, Somebody Loves Me, The Memphis Blues, Nashville Nightengale, I Ain't Got Nobody.
After You’ve Gone (1918) is found at Season 1 episode 31.
Delivered the blues wisecrack threat “when I get my razor sharp you'll have wings and play a harp". Like Clara Smith singing when my razor and your neck connect. Her Paradise Blues (included on our Spencer Williams show) in 1916 is an early blues reflecting the Bert Williams' songs commenting on music, "Play that Barbershop Chord" and "You Can't Get Away From It". Harris’s existence is so improbable that it is simply denied. One of a handful of the better popular singers she broke in I Ain’t Got Nobody in 1916 before anyone had words for what is Jazz singing. She invented jazz singing and it holds up today. Not with the voice of a Bessie or Clara Smith but was a good enough actress to interpret the song dispositively.
Around the time women were fighting a war against men to get the vote, Harris expressed a young liberated urban life, Runnin’ Wild, but also personified the femininity of the newlywed New Yorker in Tea for Two. There doesn’t seem to be any published biography of Harris so facts are sketchy despite her being a superstar in vaudeville, and later a pioneer of the lounge torch song. In 1929 she starred in a movie musical. But illness and a move to England took her out of circulation in the US and she died young in her forties.
Rose of Rio Grande is here a generation before Ivy Anderson. WC Handy was the recipient of her relaxed interpretation of his material. She introduced Spencer Williams’ first hit standard in 1916. She could float on a dream in Gershwin’s Nashville Nightengale, Haunting Blues, See You in my Dreams and then go wild in Runnin’, See Mama. And launch hit standards It Had to Be You and Somebody Loves Me. The personality behind the singing stands out with Runnin’ Wild defining the image for her young upwardly mobile jazz New York audience. She was not authentic in the rougher Bessie Smith blues and had no access to Ma Rainey’s mysticism. It’s not believable that she could kill a rival and St. Louis Gal is omitted for that reason as a mistake. She was a month by month star personality for a long run of years. She was hip personified before Calloway wrote the dictionary. She was a counterpart to Charlie Chaplin as an independent modernite. Handy’s softer blues approach fit her style. Her place in jazz music as an original who helped start it all, holding the baton from Bert Williams is almost entirely buried by time and neglect. It is too unbelievable so best forgotten. Plus that originator’s role is more fully chronicled with the several Smiths, Alberta Hunter and others. Harris had a broad national and international popular song following for whom she helped define a jazz age where all women were welcome and presumed hip.
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