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Marion Harris

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Birth name
  
Mary Ellen Harrison

Occupation(s)
  
Singer

Name
  
Marion Harris

Movies
  
Devil-May-Care

Genres
  
Jazz, blues, pop

Years active
  
1914—1930s

Role
  
Singer

Children
  
Marion Williams

Marion Harris 1914 1916 standards Songbook
Born
  
April 4, 1896 Indiana, U.S. (?) (
1896-04-04
)

Labels
  
Victor, Columbia, Brunswick

Died
  
April 23, 1944, New York City, New York, United States

Spouse
  
Rush Hughes (m. 1923–1927), Robert Williams (m. 1921–1922)

Similar People
  
Isham Jones, Paul Whiteman, Henry Burr, Billy Murray, Ben Bernie

The complete Marion Harris compilation (1916-1924) mono HD


Marion Harris (April 4, 1896 – April 23, 1944) was an American popular singer, most successful in the 1920s. She was the first widely known white singer to sing jazz and blues songs.

Contents

Marion Harris httpsuploadwikimediaorgwikipediacommonsthu

Early life

Marion Harris Marion Harris

Born Mary Ellen Harrison, probably in Indiana, she first played vaudeville and movie theaters in Chicago around 1914. Dancer Vernon Castle introduced her to the theater community in New York, where she debuted in a 1915 Irving Berlin revue, Stop! Look! Listen!

Recordings

Marion Harris Marion Harris Wikipedia

In 1916, she began recording for Victor Records, singing a variety of songs, such as "Everybody's Crazy 'bout the Doggone Blues, But I'm Happy", "After You've Gone", "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (later recorded by Bessie Smith), "When I Hear that Jazz Band Play" and her biggest success, "I Ain't Got Nobody".

Marion Harris Marion Harris

In 1920, after the Victor label would not allow her to record W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues", she joined Columbia Records, where she recorded the song successfully. Sometimes billed as "The Queen of the Blues," she tended to record blues- or jazz-flavored tunes throughout her career. Handy wrote of Harris that "she sang blues so well that people hearing her records sometimes thought that the singer was colored." Harris commented, "You usually do best what comes naturally, so I just naturally started singing Southern dialect songs and the modern blues songs."

She was briefly married to actor Robert Williams. They married in 1921 and divorced the following year. Harris and Williams had one daughter Mary Ellen, who later became a singer in her own right under the name Marion Harris Jr.

In 1922 she moved to the Brunswick label. She continued to appear in Broadway theatres throughout the 1920s. She regularly played the Palace Theatre, appeared in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic and toured the country with vaudeville shows. After a marriage which produced two children, and her subsequent divorce, she returned in 1927 to New York theater, made more recordings with Victor and appeared in an eight-minute promotional film, Marion Harris, Songbird of Jazz. After a Hollywood movie, the early musical Devil-May-Care (1929) with Ramon Novarro, she temporarily withdrew from performing because of an undisclosed illness.

Radio

Between 1931 and 1933, when she performed on such NBC radio shows as The Ipana Troubadors and Rudy Vallee's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour, she was billed by NBC as "The Little Girl with the Big Voice."

Marion Harris Marion Harris It Had To Be You YouTube

In early 1931 she performed in London, returning for long engagements at the Cafe de Paris. In London she appeared in the musical Ever Green and broadcast on BBC radio. She also recorded in England in the early 1930s but retired soon afterwards and married an English theatrical agent. Their house was destroyed in a German rocket attack in 1941, and in 1944 she travelled to New York to seek treatment for a neurological disorder. Although she was discharged two months later, she died soon afterwards in a hotel fire that started when she fell asleep while smoking in bed.

Songs

After You've Gone
Jazz Baby
I'm a Jazz Vampire
I Ain't Got Nobody
They Go Wild - Simply Wild - over Me
Paradise Blues
There's a Lump of Sugar Down in Dixie
When Alexander Takes His Ragtime Band To France
I'm Gonna Make Hay While the Sun Shines in Virginia
I Ain't Got Nobody Much
Left All Alone Again Blues
I'm Nobody's Baby
Take Me To The Land Of Jazz
Everybody's Crazy 'Bout the Doggone Blues but I'm Happy
Did You Mean It?
Grieving for You
Sweet Indiana Home
The Man I Love
My Syncopated Melody Man
Aggravatin' Papa
Nobody's Using It Now
My Canary Has Circles Under His Eyes
Don't Leave Me Daddy
When You and I Were Seventeen
Everybody's Crazy Bout the Doggone Blues
Mammy's Chocolate Soldier
I Remember You from Somewhere
Oh Judge - He Treats Me Mean
Wasn't It Nice?
Nobody Cares If I'm Blue
Funny Dear What Love Can Do
Some Sunny Day

References

Marion Harris Wikipedia