Billy Tipton

Happy Birthday, Billy Tipton...December 29, 1914-January 21 1989...It wasn't until his death at the age of 75 that the world learned that Billy Tipton had been born Dorothy Lucille Tipton. Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma but raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Billy spent the first years of his life with an aunt after his parents divorced. He saw very little of his father, William, but took his nickname "Billy" as his stage name when he went professional.

Tipton gained an interest in jazz while in high school, playing the piano and saxophone. At the age of 19, Tipton obtained documents listing him as a man, bound his breasts, padded his pants and embarked on a serious music career as a male jazz pianist. Initially he presented himself as a man only when he performed but by 1940 he was living as a man in his private life too. His deception lasted for fifty years through five common-law wives, children and a busy touring and recording schedule.

In 1936, Tipton was the leader of a band playing for a local radio station. Two years later he began touring the Midwest playing at taverns and dances, finally landing a 2 1/2 year long gig at Joplin, Missouri's Cotton Club playing with George Meyer's band. He toured the Pacific Northwest with Meyer in 1949 and eventually landed jobs backing the Ink Spots, The Delta Rhythm Boys and Billy Eckstine. He formed his own trio and landed his first recording contract when he was spotted by a talent scout while playing in Santa Barbara, California. The trio recorded two successful albums of jazz standards for Tops Records in 1957.

After the albums' success, Tipton's trio was offered a position as the house band at the Holiday Hotel in Reno, Nevada and received an invitation from Tops to record four more albums. Tipton turned down both offers, possibly to avoid being exposed as a woman as the publicity heated up. Instead he moved to Spokane, Washington where the trio worked as the house band at Tin Pan Alley and Tipton began working as a talent broker. By 1970 Tipton retired from music due to arthritis.

Tipton's personal life seemed to dictate many of his life choices. All but the first of his five common-law wives believed he was a man. He told them all that he was in a car accident that damaged his ribs and genitals which required having to bind his chest at all times. His three sons were all adopted and believed him to be a man too, until the day the paramedics were called in as he was dying and the truth was exposed when the bindings were necessarily cut. Tipton was a very talented musician but he avoided the limelight in order to live life his way and as a result, never gained the appreciation he deserved as a musician.

Bunny Berigan

Happy Birthday, Roland Bernard "Bunny" Berigan...November 2, 1908-June 2, 1942...Bunny Berigan's talent and fame rose like a meteor and burned out just as quickly but the music he left continues to inspire. Raised in Wisconsin, Berigan was a natural musician, playing both violin and trumpet and joining his Grandfather's youth band at the age of 12.  By 14 he was playing in local bands and in 1928 he auditioned for Hal Kemp's orchestra. He was turned away for having too thin a tone. Two years later, in 1930, he auditioned again and Kemp took him on a European tour and gave Berigan his first recorded solos.

When he returned to the U.S. in the fall of 1930, Berigan became a much sought after studio musician. In 1931 he joined the staff of the illustrious CBS radio network musicians which included players like Artie Shaw. When he wasn't working for CBS he was freelancing on sessions at various recording studios around New York City and playing in pit orchestras on Broadway. His output was prodigious and his talent and star kept rising. From late 1932 to 1934 he joined Paul Whiteman's orchestra, leaving in 1934 for a short stint with Abe Lyman.

His reputation as a strong soloist kept him in demand, playing with the Boswell Sisters, Glenn Miller and the Dorsey Brothers among many. It seemed whatever he lent his clear, beautiful tone and wide range to turned to gold. From 1935-1939 he stood with Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge as one of the top trumpeters in jazz. When asked about other players in 1941, Louis Armstrong replied, "About the trumpet players I admire...first I would name my boy Bunny Berigan. Now there's a boy I've always admired for his tone, soul, technique, His sense of phrasing and all. To me, Bunny can't do no wrong in music."

In 1935 Berigan joined Benny Goodman's band and became part of the tour out West and the broadcast from the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles that some say launched the Swing Era. He recorded major solos with Goodman on classics like "King Porter Stomp", "Sometimes I'm Happy" and "Blue Skies". After the tour, Berigan left Goodman and went back to freelancing as a recording and radio musician and recorded under his own name for the first time. He was a popular player for singers of the era and backed Billie Holiday, Mildred Bailey and Bing Crosby among others. He also joined Tommy Dorsey's band from 1936-1937 and gave the Dorsey recordings of "Marie" and "Song of India" their distinct sound.

It took three tries, but Berigan was able to form his own band in 1937. He played trumpet on nearly every number and conducted at the same time. He chose "I Can't Get Started" by Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke as his theme song and made the tune a smash hit that is still included in jazz compilations and in movie scores today. But Berigan was an alcoholic and the stresses of leading a band only made things worse. Despite his drinking, other musicians respected him as a leader and he was able to attract top talent for his band but that wasn't enough. By 1939 he declared bankruptcy and briefly joined Tommy Dorsey's as a sideman in 1940 but he wasn't happy and the drinking increased. He tried forming his own band again in 1941 but his health had already made a steep decline. He died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 33.

Ford Lee "Buck" Washington

Happy Birthday Ford Lee "Buck" Washington...October 16, 1903-January 1, 1955..."Buck" Washington was one half of the famous dancing duo "Buck and Bubbles" as well as an accomplished musician, singer and comedian. Washington and John Sublett (Bubbles) were orphans when they teamed up as pre-teens, winning local amature contests in Louisville, Kentucky. They went on to join the vaudeville circuit, traveling to Detroit and New York with an act that included dancing, singing, antics at the piano and a big dose of comedy.

Their routine never varied much in the many years they performed together but it was a formula that made them some of the best loved performers of their day. They broke the color barrier in the 20's by playing in white vaudeville houses as well as black ones. They appeared in several Broadway revues in the 20's and 30's, then made their way to Hollywood to appear in movies such as "Varsity Show" and "A Song is Born." The pair performed together until shortly before Washington died at the age of 51.

Victoria Spivey

Happy Birthday, Victoria Spivey...October 15, 1906-October 3, 1976...Victoria Spivey got her start in her native Houston, Texas performing with her family's string band. By the age of 19 she was playing piano for local silent film theaters and singing and performing in local bars, brothels and clubs, sometimes accompanied by Blind Lemon Jefferson. In 1926, at the age of 20 she made her way to St. Louis to try her luck.

She was signed by Okeh records and her original composition, "Black Snake Blues", was a huge success. That was followed by "Dirty Woman Blues" and for two years after that, the red hot Spivey recorded nearly one record a month, often accompanied by talent such as Lonnie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Clarence Williams and many others. Her biggest influence was another red hot Blues Woman, Ida Cox, and the topics of the songs Spivey wrote were often of the same raw nature, covering subjects like drug addiction, poverty, crime, health issues and sex.

As the Depression set in and most ladies of the blues left the circuit, Spivey found a new outlet for her talents, first in King Vidor's first sound film "Halleluyah" as Miss Rosie, and later in other films and stage shows, including the acclaimed "Hellzapoppin"" review in New York. She was able to continue to record and perform through the 1940's.

In the 1950's. Spivey retired from show business, playing a pipe organ in her church and leading the choir. But the early 60's blues revival would bring her out of retirement and back into the limelight. As one of the few surviving original Ladies of the Blues, Spivey was in big demand at folk and blues festivals. Her sexually suggestive song lyrics resonated with the sexual revolution of the 60's and 70's. Spivey created her own record company, Spivey Records, and Bob Dylan joined her on her first recording for the label. Her album "Songs We Taught Your Mother" featured Alberta Hunter and Lucille Hegiman and brought women in the blues back to the forefront. Spivey continued to perform, record and preserve the blues of her heyday until her death just shy of her 70th birthday.

Peg Leg Bates

Happy Birthday, Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates...October 11, 1907-December 8, 1998...Dancing was intrinsic to Bates who remembered always wanting to dance from the age of five. While working in a cotton seed gin mill at the age of 12 in his hometown of Fountain Inn, South Carolina, Bates became caught up in the machinery and his left leg was mangled. It was amputated below the knee on his kitchen table at home. Bates was confined to crutches to get around but in his words, "At first I was walking around on crutches and, I started making musical rhythm with them. See, I did not realize the importance of losing a leg. I thought it was just like stubbing my toe and knocking off a toenail that was going to grow back." When his uncle Wit came home from WW1 and found his nephew handicapped, he created Bate's first crude wooden leg.

Bates continued dancing, "It somehow grew in my mind that I wanted to be as good a dancer as any two-legged dancer. It hurt me that the boys pitied me. I was pretty popular before, and I still wanted to be popular. I told them not to be sorry for me." Bates was true to his word. With enormous effort he learned to copy the rhythms steps of the popular tappers of his day, adding his own unique acrobatics and novelty steps. By the age of 15 he was traveling the minstrel show and vaudeville circuits becoming the undisputed king of one-legged dancers. His appearance in Paris in  Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1929 gave him the boost to return to New York in 1930 as a featured tap dancer at the Cotton Club, Connie's Inn and Club Zanzibar.

With his deep toned-toned left leg peg and his higher-pitched metallic right foot tap he rhythmically reinvented popular tap steps like the Shim Sham, Susie-Q and Truckin'. He would perform dive bombing type maneuvers, landing balanced on his peg leg. He owned 13 of them; one to match each of his suits.Unlike many tap dancers, he didn't focus on one style. "Well, I'm into rhythm and I'm into novelty. I'm into doing things that looks almost impossible to do.", he explained. He mastered the styles to surpass two-legged dancers, and he often did. Many tappers became associated with certain big bands as part of the general entertainment. Bates topped them all, dancing with the bands of Jimmy Dorsey, Charlie Barnett, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Erskine Hawkins, Jimmie Lunceford, Claude Hopkins, Billy Eckstine and Louis Armstrong.

Bates tackled the budding television industry full on, appearing on the Ed Sullivan show 21 times, more than any other tap dancer. He often used the show to dance tap-offs with other well known tap dancers. He also traveled extensively and performed for royalty. In 1951, Bates and his wife Alice bought a turkey farm in the Catskill Mountains and turned it into the largest black-owned-and-operated resort in the country. The Peg Leg Country Club catered to a primarily black clientele in a predominantly Jewish resort area, presenting some of the finest jazz musicians and entertainers of it's day. "At first the natives were resentful," Bates told the N.Y. Times in 1969, "But now everything is kosher, beautiful." He ran the resort until his wife died in 1987 and sold it in 1989.

In retirement, Bates spent a good deal of his time performing, teaching and speaking to youth groups, senior citizens and the handicapped, spreading his philosophy of being involved no matter what life brought your way. "Life means, do the best you can with what you've got, with all your mind and heart. You can do anything in this world if you want to do it bad enough." He died at the age of 91 in his home town, just a mile and a half from the place he lost his leg.

Rosetta Reitz

Happy Birthday, Rosetta Reitz...September 28, 1924-November 1, 2008...Without the tireless, diligent work of Rosetta Reitz, much of the music and history of many female jazz artists would be lost to us. Throughout her lifetime Reitz enjoyed a varied career which included working as a stockbroker, a food columnist for the Village Voice, a college professor, owning a greeting card company and the Four Seasons bookstore and writing a groundbreaking book on women's menopause. She was an outspoken feminist and the co-founder of the Older Women's Liberation (OWL). She also founded Rosetta Records which focused on the female recording artists who had been forgotten and ignored by mainstream labels.

Reitz's introduction to jazz was through her ex-husband and other male friends but over time she began to realize that women's music was missing from what she was listening to. She began collecting old 78 recordings of musicians like trumpeter and vocalist Valaida Snow, pianist and singer Georgia White and a host of forgotten blues singers. She also discovered many lost recordings by better known performers including Ida Cox, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Mae West. Her collection covered music from the 1920's to the 1960's with an emphasis on the music of the Blues Queens of the 20's.

Reitz was quoted in the 1980's, "In that decade in the 1920's, when jazz was really being formulated and changing from an entertainment music into an art form, these women were extraordinarily important and instrumental in accomplishing that. Louis Armstrong was a sideman on records in the '20's with singers like Sippie Wallace, Eva Taylor, Hociel Thomas, Virginia Liston and Margaret Johnson. These women's records were made as their records, but when they come out now they are reissued as Louis Armstrong records, when actually he's not that important on them."

"These women had the power. They hired the musicians and the chorus line, a lot of them wrote the music themselves and they produced their own shows. They were more than just singers; they were symbols of success."

With $10,000 she borrowed from friends, Reitz founded Rosetta Records in 1979. Most of the music she released was already in the public domain but she made a point of tracking down the rights to some of the songs and paying royalties to the artists when she could. She supervised the remastering of the often damaged original records, researched the backgrounds of the artists, wrote the liner notes, designed the album graphics and found vintage photographs for the albums. Originally sold through mail order, the label was eventually picked up by several record stores. As recording technology progressed, the albums were converted to tapes and then CD's. Reitz released 17 compilations of vintage jazz and blues, most of them centered around a theme but she also recorded retrospectives of The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Valaida Snow and Mae West.

In 1980 and 1981, Reitz produced a tribute to "Women of Jazz"  at Avery Fisher Hall as part of the Newport Jazz Festival. It was called "The Blues is a Woman" and featured Adelaide Hall, Big Mama Thornton, Nell Carter and Koko Taylor with narration by Carmen McRae. She also lobbied for a postage stamp in Bessie Smith's honor. Reitz planned to release 26 albums and write a book on women in jazz but she died at the age of 84 of heart disease before she could fully realize her dream. Her albums have not been reissued but renewed interest in many of the artists Rietz promoted have been re-discovered by the greater recording industry.

Slam Stewart

Happy Birthday, Leroy Eliot "Slam" Stewart...September 21, 1914-December 10, 1987...Slam Stewart was an excellent swing bassist with a unique sound which he created by humming along an octave higher than his bowing. He started playing violin but switched permanently to the bass at age 20 while attending the Boston Conservatory. It was there that he got his idea of humming along with his instrument after hearing Ray Perry singing along with his violin.

In 1937, Stewart teamed up with singer, guitar player, comedian "Slam" Gaillard to form the novelty act "Slim and "Slam". "Flat Foot Floogie" was their first big hit in 1938 and it cemented their popularity until the act broke up in the early 40's. Stewart worked regularly throughout the 40's doing session work with Art Tatum, Lester Young, Fats Waller, Coleman Hawkins, Red Norvo (which featured a famous session with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker) and the Benny Goodman Sextet, among others. He also headed his own group which at one point included Erroll Garner on piano.

Later in his career he worked with other groups headed by Billy Taylor and Roy Eldridge. He also recorded a couple of albums with another "Humming" bassist, Major Holley. His unique and solid bass style kept him working regularly when he wasn't busy teaching at the University of New York in Binghamton, New York or at Yale University.  He died in Binghamton at the age of 73.