Alberta Hunter & Fletcher Henderson - Someone Else Will Take Your Place (Paramount 12017)
Now this is an exciting acquisition: my first blues paramount! And goddamn is it a good one in multiple ways! The elephant in the room, the red shellac, is a great rarity! The only thing cooler would be blue shellac (get it? blue for blues?). Maybe we shouldn't give paramount excuses to make their shitty records sound even worse, but they sure do look nice! I doubt it's legible on the image (hope you guys like my new old flatbed scanner) but it says at the bottom that her accompanist on the piano is none other than FLETCHER HENDERSON, and the record is just as good as a Hunter-Henderson duo sounds!
Before any of the rural blues players had a real breakthrough in the record market, these female cabaret singers such as Alberta Hunter, Lucille Hegamin and Mamie Smith were hot sellers in more ways than one. Accompaniment ranged from barrelhouse piano as here to full fledged jazzbands! Hunter had as excellent a career as any, though perhaps less well known today than Mamie Smith, for example. She left home for Memphis aged only eleven, hoping to find employment as a singer. She was a legendary improvisor of lyrics, which came to fruition at the Panama Club in the early 20s, where she would draw white audiences up to her cabaret room with her great voice and improvised lyrics! By 1923, she was socialising with people such as King Oliver and recording for many different companies. In fact, she tried to get Columbia to record King Oliver, but they refused unless she would come with them! Possibly apocryphal, but that's how the legend goes! That same year, these two great sides were recorded at paramount!
Her career with paramount ended after Mayo Williams, the man behind Black Patti and one of the best talent scouts out there, sold out her song "Downhearted Blues" to Columbia and claimed all royalties. Bessie Smith's subsequent version sold a million copies. Ouch. She continued singing, both in Europe and the US until the death of her mother in 1957 caused her early retirement. She then faked her way into nursing before retiring from that well into her 80s, and had a little revival before her death in '84. Her story is a great one, and even better are her records. Sadly, her best content is on the paramount label, as here, who are now notorious for having the best music and the most awful quality records. If only it were a viva-tonal Columbia...
Music transferred from my original 78rpm shellac record 08/12/24.
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