Alberta Hunter

• Born: April 1, 1895
• Birthplace: Memphis, Tennessee
• Died: October 17, 1984
• Place of death: New York, New York

American jazz/blues singer and songwriter

With a career spanning seven decades, Hunter was a blues pioneer in the 1920’s and an American jazz expatriate in Europe in the 1930’s and 1940’s, onstage and in cabarets. She made a remarkable comeback at the age of eighty-two, with nightly performances at New York City’s famous nightclub the Cookery and recordings that harked back to the days of Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker.

The Life

Alberta Hunter was born in Memphis in 1895 to Charles and Laura Hunter. Charles, a sleeping car porter, abandoned Laura and her two children soon after Alberta’s birth. When she was sixteen, Hunter moved to Chicago and got her first job as a singer at Dago Frank’s, a cabaret and bordello. On January 27, 1919, she married Willard Townsend, and they were separated within weeks and divorced a few years later. Meanwhile, her popularity as a singer netted her the headlining act at the famous Dreamland Café and recordings with top jazz names. In 1924 she became a star of Broadway and vaudeville and moved to Harlem. In 1927 she traveled to Europe, where African American entertainers such as Josephine Baker were the rage. Hunter became a stage hit in Paris and starred in the London production of Show Boat (1927) with Paul Robeson. With the expiration of her passport in 1940, she returned to New York. During World War II, she performed for the United Services Organization (USO). With her theatrical career waning, she received a nurse’s license in 1957, working for the next twenty years at Goldwater Hospital on Welfare (now Roosevelt) Island.

In 1977 she was rediscovered and began a remarkable new career singing at the Cookery restaurant near Greenwich Village. A nationwide sensation, Hunter performed at the White House, at Carnegie Hall, at the Smithsonian (where she was captured on videotape), and on ABC’s Good Morning America. She toured Europe and Brazil and recorded three albums. In ill health, Hunter retired in 1983 and died the following year.

The Music

Hunter grew up in the midst of Memphis’s flourishing blues culture, centered on Beale Street. She sang in church choirs from an early age, and she was only a teenager when she moved to Chicago and her musical career began in earnest.

Chicago Blues. Hunter established her reputation singing in the bordellos and honky-tonks of Chicago. In the 1910’s and 1920’s, Chicago had an exciting mix of Southern blues and New Orleans jazz amalgamating in its nightclubs. As a blues singer, Hunter lacked the raw power and emotion of Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, but Hunter was renowned for her smooth vocalizations, sophisticated diction, and world-weary ballads, and for the frank sensuality of her lyrics. Hunter sang with Joe “King” Oliver’s band and recorded songs accompanied by such famous jazz musicians as Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller, Eubie Blake, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong. She was the first to sing “Sweet Georgia Brown” for its composer Maceo Pinkard, and she showcased “St. Louis Blues” and “Beale Street Blues” for their composer W. C. Handy. A prolific songwriter, Hunter saw her composition “Downhearted Blues” become a classic when sung by Smith.

“My Castle’s Rockin’.” With her gift for physical expression and a more entertaining than powerful voice, Hunter gravitated to musical theater. In 1920 she sang a blues number in the revue Canary Cottage, and she performed in numerous shows in the following years. In 1924 she formed her own vaudeville troupe, and in 1925 she popularized, if not invented, the flapper dance known as the Black Bottom. Following in the footsteps of Baker, Hunter moved to Europe in 1927 and performed over the next two decades in shows in Paris, London, and Amsterdam. With Chicago blues in decline, her songs became more personal, upbeat, and showy, as reflected in her 1940 composition “My Castle’s Rockin’,” which would become her theme song. It was shortly after this, however, that Hunter returned to the United States and her career declined.

Cookin’ at the Cookery. Incredibly, in 1977, at age eighty-two, Hunter emerged from a twenty-year hiatus to be the headline singer at the Cookery restaurant in Manhattan. For enthusiastic audiences, it was a glimpse of 1920’s Chicago and 1930’s Paris, as Hunter belted out classic blues numbers and sophisticated ballads, described by one critic as “joyous, sly, sensual as well as sad.” Her voice, richer and more assured, had ripened with age. With her entertaining mannerisms and theatricality born of decades onstage, she formed an instant rapport with her audiences. Her trademark renditions of “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” “You Can’t Tell the Difference After Dark,” and “I Got a Mind to Ramble” combined a blues style with an upbeat theatrical patter. Her blatant double entendres are humorously evident in the song “My Man Is Such a Handy Man,” and her joie de vivre shines through in “I’m Having a Good Time.” Building on her newfound popularity, she recorded several award-winning albums for Columbia Records and the sound track for the 1978 Robert Altman film Remember My Name, and she appeared on numerous television talk shows. My Castle’s Rockin’—a 1988 video documentary—captured her performances at the Cookery with all of their charm and verve. The musical Cookin’ at the Cookery: The Music and Times of Alberta Hunter, written by Marion Caffey in 2003, is still popular.

Musical Legacy

Alberta Hunter was a pioneer of urban blues in 1920’s Chicago and much celebrated at the time. Although she was an original and enthralling blues singer, her recordings lack the intensity and strength that characterize other great female blues singers of that era, such as Smith and Ma Rainey. In the succeeding decades, she was a success on the stages of New York and Europe but by and large in ephemeral musical numbers.

Perhaps her greatest legacy stems from her years at the Cookery. Live and in recordings, she transported new generations back to the early years of Chicago blues and swinging jazz. Her sassy and sophisticated vocal style, enhanced by a lifetime of stage performance, left a charming and indelible memory with her audiences.

Bibliography

Harrison, Daphne Duval. Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920’s. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Assesses Hunter in the context of the social and cultural phenomenon of black female blues pioneers.

Santelli, Robert. Big Book of Blues. New York: Penguin, 2001. Comprehensive reference work with more than six hundred biographical entries on individual blues musicians, including Hunter.

Shipton, Alyn. New History of Jazz. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007. Notes Hunter’s theatrical style of diction and presentation.

Taylor, Frank, with Gerald Cook. Alberta Hunter: A Celebration in Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987. Based on extensive interviews with Hunter and her friends, this conversational biography, cowritten with her Cookery pianist, includes a discography and videography.

Ward, Geoffrey, and Ken Burns. Jazz: A History of America’s Music. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000. Based on Burns’s award-winning documentary film, includes a historic 1923 photograph of Hunter from the days when she sang with Louis Armstrong.

Principal Recordings

albums:Alberta Hunter with Lovie Austin and Her Blues Serenaders, 1961; Songs We Taught Your Mother, 1961 (with Lucille Hegamin and Victoria Spivey); Remember My Name, 1977; Amtrak Blues, 1978; The Glory of Alberta Hunter, 1981; Look for the Silver Lining, 1982; The Legendary Alberta Hunter: The London Sessions, 1934, 1989.

singles: “Downhearted Blues,” 1922; “Jazzin’ Baby Blues,” 1922; “Stingaree Blues,” 1923; “Texas Moaner Blues,” 1924; “Your Jelly Roll Is Good,” 1925; “Beale Street Blues,” 1927; “Sugar,” 1927.