Teddy Grace

Happy Birthday, Teddy Grace 1905-1992...Born Stella Crowson to a well-to-do family from Arcadia, Louisiana, Grace lived a privileged life even after the death of both of her parents from flu when she was 14. She married early to a wealthy businessman, George Grace, from Montgomery, Alabama and joined the country club set, traveling with her husband on occasional business excursions and tending a spacious home.
Her life probably would have continued in that vein had a friend not heard her singing along to a W.C. Handy tune being broadcast on the radio and dared her to sing it at a country club dance in 1931.

Her soulful rendition of St. Louis Blues caused a sensation. The owner of a local radio station, WSFA, put her on the air the next day where she was a steady performer for a couple of years, moving to the bigger station in Birmingham where she sometimes sang with an orchestra and sometimes accompanied herself on piano or a guitar strung like a ukulele. Her signature song was "Stormy Weather", a song she ironically never got around to recording. From there she joined Al Stanley and his Arcadians for a Gulf Coast tour, ending up in Pensacola, Florida for a month-long engagement.

The touring put a strain on the marriage. Mr. Grace considered her singing "cute" at first and then a nuisance. When Al Katz and his Kittens came looking for a vocalist, Teddy jumped at the chance and left the marriage behind. In 1932 she joined Tommy Christian's orchestra in New York, playing to bigger audiences and catching the attention of Mal Hallet who hired her in 1934. Hallet's orchestra was a popular touring band and Grace's bluesy interpretations added some grit to their white-boy swing. She recorded ten sides with Hallet in 1937 and Warner Brothers produced a short featuring her and the band "teaching" a crash course in "Swinglish".

Decca signed her to record and five of the best musicians around gave her one day for scale which produced  four of her best tracks including "Love Me or Leave Me" and "Crazy Blues". Grace, Frank Froeba, Bobby Hackett, Buster Bailey and Jack Teagarden started drinking early in the day but you can't hear it in the music. The success of those recordings spurred Decca to take another chance a year later and Grace returned to the studio with a slightly larger band but still drawing from the same bluesy material. Recordings with Bob Crosby's band and Bud Freeman's Orchestra would follow but the record companies didn't know what to do with a white woman who sounded black and sang in a style that didn't fit the traditional mold of white female singers. By 1940 she had become disenchanted with the business and withdrew into private life.

It was the tragic death of her nephew in WW2 in 1943 that brought her back into the limelight. She joined the Women's Army Corps and began touring, singing and organizing war-bond drives all over the Southeast. She enlisted stars such as Ozzie and Harriet, Bob Hope and Red Skelton, raising over three hundred million dollars and consistently breaking records for recruitment. She sang at every stop and her schedule was grueling. She shredded her voice and ended up in a Little Rock, Arkansas hospital speechless. Six months later she was able to whisper but she never sang again.

She died in California at the age of 87.