AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING, 2022
VOLUME ELEVEN NUMBER TWO
ROSCOE MITCHELL
MORGAN GUERIN
(March 18-24)
KENNY KIRKLAND
(March 26-APRIL 1)
STACEY DILLARD
(April 2-8)
CHARENÉE WADE
(April 9-15)
JAMAEL DEAN
(April 16-22)
BRUCE HARRIS
April 23-29)
BENJAMIN BOOKER
(April 30-May 7)
UNA MAE CARLISLE
(May 7-13)
JUSTIN BROWN
(May 14-20)
TYLER MITCHELL
(May 21-27)
JONTAVIOUS WILLIS
(May 28-June 3)
CHRIS BECK
Una Mae Carlisle
(1915-1956)
Artist Biography by Eugene Chadbourne
A talent discovery of the great Fats Waller, Una Mae Carlisle achieved much success as both a performer and songwriter. She developed a long-term relationship with publisher, producer, and frequent record-label manager Joe Davis, who sold upwards of 20,000 copies of some of her releases. Carlisle's original songs, such as "I See a Million People" and "Walkin' by the River," were smashes, covered by many popular artists such as Cab Calloway and Peggy Lee. By the late '40s she had both her own radio and television shows, but an unfortunate illness cut her career short, forcing her to retire in 1954. This was about 22 years after Waller first heard her entertaining in Cincinnati, where she was established as a live radio performer. She was already playing in a piano style modeled after his, and displayed a real flair for the range of material he did, including boogie-woogie and comedy. He took her under his wing (and there was plenty of room there, since they didn't call him Fats Waller for nothing). By 1937 she was off as a solo act, touring Europe and hanging around for long residencies in countries such as France. In England she performed and recorded with a combo once again styled after Waller. At home she continued her collaborations with the master himself, providing the vocal on the 1939 Waller recording of "I Can't Give You Anything but Love." In the early '40s she began recording sessions under her own name for Bluebird, featuring top swing sidemen and soloists including tenor saxophonist Lester Young, alto saxophonist and clarinetist Benny Carter, and pianist John Kirby. She also began working as a solo act in clubs such as New York City's Village Vanguard. Her relationship with Davis, another early associate of Waller's, began after her Bluebird contract lapsed. Davis took a similar approach to recording her, making use of her talents as a prolific songwriter and surrounding her once again with excellent players, including the Duke Ellington star Ray Nance, who doubled on trumpet and violin; Budd Johnson on tenor saxophone; and drummer Shadow Wilson. The tunes included "Tain't Yours," written by Carlisle and her manager, Barney Young, a title that certainly didn't apply to record buyers who snapped up this release in a manner that must have put a grin on Davis' face. Davis put her tunes into play at many sessions he produced by other artists, and he also issued sheet music of her compositions, including a charming photograph of Carlisle wearing a truly weird hat. Some of the later recording collaborations between Carlisle and Davis didn't go off as well, including an unfortunate session at which one tune was tried some 16 times without ever being played properly. Carlisle's final recordings were done for Columbia in the early '50s and featured Don Redman. Her discography languished between her death and the mid-'80s, when the first Carlisle reissue came out on the Harlequin label. Subsequently there have been reissues by RCA, which owns the Bluebird catalog, and the French Melodie Jazz label. She can be seen onscreen in the 1948 Boarding House Blues, an all-black production directed by Josh Binney which is made up mostly of performances by various jazz and vaudeville acts.
https://www.angelfire.com/jazz/ninamaemckinney/UnaMaeCarlisle.html
Una Mae Carlisle- The Queen of Jive Mellow and Piano
One of the top female vocalist of the 1940s.
Song-stylist and Piano Extraordinaire.
Una Mae Carlisle won hearts of millions in the 1940s and early 1950s with her husky, intimate warm sensual voice whiched proved to be as effective on swing numbers as it was on ballads. Una Mae Carlisle's music was neither jazz, blues it was a mixture of classical, swing, jazz, blues and bebop. Una Mae displayed her art of combining the different genres of music successfully in her stylish, catchy tunes.
Una Mae was an original, fresh artist of her time which was what the business needed. Una Mae had a vivaciousness personality, wit, and sense of humor which showed in her slick, smooth, cool, jazzy tunes. Una Mae was the queen of sweet, hot n mellow genre which she created.
Una Mae was born December 26, 1915 in Xenia, Ohio. She always had ambitions to be in show business. Child prodigy Una Mae took to music very early, giving her first public performace at the age of 3 in Chillicothe, O., where she played and sang on a musical program for disabled World War 1 veterans. While still in her teens, Duke Ellington heard her play and helped her get a job with a Cleveland radio station. She ran away from home at the age of 12 to try to get a job as a musician in Cleveland, that's where she met Fats Waller who was an important influence on Una Mae's development. When she was 13, Waller called her from Cincinnati and invited her to appear on his radio program during her Christmas vacation. She was allowed to go with her older sister as her chaperon.
The lure of show business proved too powerful for Una Mae to resist. She didn't want to go back home after her stint in Cincinnati. Mature Una Mae not only stayed in Cincinnati for several weeks, but went on to Chicago where she met other girls her age whose great dreams was to go to New York and find dancing jobs. Una Mae and three other girls, one of whom was white passing as Black, put the little money they had together and bought bus tickets to Harlem. They had heard that the famed Cotton Club had issued a call for chorus girls. Una Mae was hired as show girl in 1934 along with one of the other girls, Bea Ellis known as Ivie who became Duke Ellington's mistress. Three weeks later Una Mae quit the Cotton Club. The atmosphere was too much for her, she couldn't take that kind of life. She decided being a chorus girl wasn't the type of career she wanted in Show Business.
After that calamity. She took her music more seriously. Una Mae studied piano and lated studied theory and harmony at Wilberforce University and studied at Ohio State University. Music publisher Irving Mills hired her as a copyist-arranger at $15 a week. For a few months that salary actually paid her room rent and kept her in food. Then Lew Leslie offered her a spot in his famous Lew Leslie Blackbirds of 1936 which opened in Europe. That was the big break she was waiting on. After that success Una Mae became the Toast of London, Cario and Paris. She felt she should stay in Europe...since there wasn't much prejudices there to stop her from succeeding. She stayed in Europe from 1935 to 1940. Una Mae lived the good life and became friends with scores of celebrities. Some of her achievements were...She hobnobbed with the Duke of Kent and Josephine Baker and was invited to play the piano at the wedding reception of Egypt's King Farouk bringing a wealth of showmanship, poise and personality to her audience. Una Mae played and singed in the most prominent supper clubs of London, Paris, Stockholm, Cairo Brussels, Madrid, and the Riviera, where Una Mae played swing and blues with sophisticated class for the high society bunch. Una Mae made films in France and England. In one of these pictures, "Crossroads," Una introduced the hit song "Darling Je Vous Aime Beaucoup," singing it as a dusky harlot of mixed racial origins. Una performed successfully in 18 European countries.
Una was admired by Kings and Dukes, and invited to dinner parties where she was the only commoner, One of her best friends was the late Duke of Kent who sometimes flew from London to Paris just to hear her play his favorite tunes at Le Boeuf Sur le Toit, a famous Paris cabaret where she played for nearly three years, she formed lasting friendships with Josephine Baker, Jean Gabin and Maurice Chevalier. For a few months in 1939, Una Mae operated her own club in Montmartre. She also found time while in Paris to study advanced harmony at the Sorbonne. One of the memorable events of her European experience was an invitation to attend the wedding of King Farouk of Egypt in 1937, where the mother of the King and family was honored to have Una played at their lavish wedding and reception. In London, on May 20, 1938, she recorded three discs that were released on the Vocalion label, including a favorite "Don't Try Your Jive On Me." Her backing band for that session included the expert West Indian musicians Dave Wilkins (trumpet) and Bertie King (clarinet and tenor sax). She became highly successful in England, Germany and France, where she worked at the Boeuf sur le Toit ("The Ox on the Roof"), a cabaret in the Rue du Colisée in Paris. While in Paris in 1939, she was one of two pianists in a combo headed by clarinetist Danny Polo which recorded four sides for Decca.
Una Mae was a glamorous, stylish pianist, composer, and singer. Una Mae was said to be in the same exalted class as Mary Lou Williams, Dorothy Donegan, and Teddy Williams. Her singing style was soothing and velvet smooth. As a composer, she had few rivals of her sex. Una was a real favorite of broadway, nightclubs, radio, recordings and movies of the 1940s receiving spectacular reviews and applause. Critics couldn't get enough of bragging on Una's musical genius. Una Mae appeared in many soundies(which were like music videos of the day) and appeared as guest star in many black films such as "Stars on Parade," "Boarding House Blues".
Una Mae sung her songs with such great personality, sex appeal while her fingers danced gracefully on the ivories with her honey glazed voice crooning hits and favorites like "My Wish," "I See A Million People," "Hangover Blues," "Don't Try Your Jive On Me," "Coffee and Cake," "Mad About Love," "I Brought Myself a Book," "That's the Stuff You Gotta Watch," "The Rest of My Life," "Throw it out your mind," "You and Your Heart of Stone," "Without You Baby," "Tain't Yours," "You Gotta Take Your Time," "Teasin' Me," "It Ain't Like That," "Yank in the Army," "O, Please," "I Do," "It Ain't Like That," "I'm a Good Good woman," "I Like cause I Love It" among other tunes showed Una Mae jive word phrasings, her scintillating finesse and clever lyrics which made her America's top notch composer and pianist. She almost sung her songs from a male's perspective. Una Mae's music was unlike any woman of her time. Her music was sexy but not blatant. She didn't sing sadly of her man doing her wrong and treating her bad. Her songs were fun, slick, smooth, poetic. Her music stood out more then any other. One of Una's talents was taking the popular slang of the time and mixing it with common words putting them together with a spice of jazz, boogie woogie and bebop was dazzling and fitted her easy-going, appealing voice. She knew how to make the simpliest words sound brilliant. Una Mae was among the popular songbirds Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald but because of her noted songwriting, composing and arrangements she stood above them.
Few achieved Una Mae's success...black or white. Another accomplishment of Una Mae's was she signed a lucrative contract with NBC. Throughout the 1940s she was a popular vocalist on radio and, before the decade was out, she had successfully transferred to television. Bluebird dropped her from its roster during the 1942-1944 American Federation of Musicians ban on recording (the "Petrillo Ban"), so she signed with Joe Davis for whom she recorded more than a dozen tracks, one of which was 'Tain't Yours with ace trumpeter Ray Nance, who had just left Duke Ellington's band. In between bouts of ill health she played clubs and hotels and appeared on radio shows, including a week-long salute to her good friend Fats Waller on WNEW in New York in February of 1945, approximately a year after his death. Una Mae had her own radio program in the late 1940s which broadcast every Monday night. For a while Una Mae career was at a halt. After a long series of reverses which included bad bookings, new songs that did not sell, a short-lived TV program and an illness that forced her into temporary retirement. The illness she suffered for many years was the reason for her many absences in show business but always the trooper Una Mae never was down long because her mind was full of songs and was a public favorite.
In 1950, Una Mae was only the only Black musician in America with a coast to coast radio program. The singing song writer whose 15 minute radio show was carried by 100 stations of the American Broadcasting Company's network was enjoyed each Saturday evening at 6:15pm by some 7,500,000 listeners. Singing oldtime favorites, many of which she herself wrote, as well as newer song hits, the veteran entertainer had won a large audience in all sections of the country as her growing fan mail indicated. ABC first offered her a network spot when one of their producers was impressed by her husky voice so frequently heard in past years in nightclubs and stage shows. Before siring her first program, however, the company queried Southern stations to discover if there would be any racial objections to carrying the program of a Black artist. There were none. Since her initial broadcast in September 1950, an increasing volume of fan mail that followed was evidence of her popularity. Her usual opening theme song was her famous "Walking by the River" and her closing signature tune, "I See a Million People," were both written by Una Mae during her heyday in the 1940s. These songs which first skyrocketed her to fame are only two of some 500 original songs she draws upon for her current radio show.
Her last studio session was for Columbia in New York on May 8, 1950. Una Mae kept on working successfuly on radio, tv, and nightclubs but her illness became too much to bare to continue so she retired in 1954. She called it quits hoping to return again in the future but that was one wish Una or fans didn't get. She died in New York on November 7, 1956.
Why isn't Una Mae Carlisle regarded as a influential figure of Jazz and Bebop? Why have so-called Jazz historians and researchers overlooked this extrodinary talent? Una Mae surely in her time was a legend because of her creative artistry, why isn't she looked at as a bigger figure in Jazz History? Why isn't she hailed for her original remarkable jazz creations and contributions. If Ella Fitzgerald is remembered because of her uniqueness and exbuerant song styling, Una Mae should be as well because Una Mae's music represented Jazz and Bebop if anyone did its her. It seems the women who independently wrote, arranged, composed their own songs and did their own thing aren't remembered as much as ladies who "stayed in their place" and sung the work of men or is it because Jazz historians want Jazz to be looked at as male dominated or a male creation then to showcase talented ladies of jazz who contributed as much? Una Mae Carlisle is another unsung Legend who isn't talked about enough. Alicia Keys is known today as a singing, songwriting, pianist talent, she's considered a phenomenal, well Una Mae Carlisle was a Alicia Keys some 65 years ago or should I say Alicia Keys is the Una Mae Carlisle of today.
Una's music is available all over. Pick up some of her records, cds, movies you will instantly fall in love with her cool crooning voice and piano.
Enjoyed Una Mae Carlisle's story, Come Home to the Main Page for stories and introductions of other unsung Black Beauties and Talents of Stage and Screen!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Una_Mae_Carlisle
Una Mae Carlisle
https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/its-sad-but-true-una-mae-carlisle-1915-56/
IT’S SAD BUT TRUE: UNA MAE CARLISLE (1915-56)
If Una Mae Carlisle is known at all today, it is as a jazz footnote and “friend-of”: protege (perhaps mistress) of Fats Waller; singer on the lone and lovely record date that Lester Young’s band did in 1941; composer of WALKIN’ BY THE RIVER, someone recording with Danny Polo, John Kirby, Big Nick Nicholas, Buster Bailey, Ray Nance, Budd Johnson, Walter Thomas. Sadly, her life was very short, made even shorter by illness. I propose that she deserves admiration for her own art, not just for her associations with greater stars.
Una Mae had all the qualities that would have made her a success, and she did get some of the attention she deserved. She had a big embracing voice; she could croon and swing; she was a splendid pianist — more than a Waller clone.
Here are two samples of her genial, casual art, in 1940 and 1941. First, the song she composed (its title suggested by John Steinbeck). The wonderful small group is Benny Carter, trumpet; Everett Barksdale, guitar; Slam Stewart, string bass; Zutty Singleton, drums. Una Mae plays piano. Were Ed Berger here with us, he could tell us how Benny came to be in that studio — perhaps a rehearsal for his own Bluebird big-band date a few days later:
Here is one side from the famous session with Lester Young, Shad Collins, Clyde Hart, John Collins, Nick Fenton, Harold “Doc” West in 1941:
I come from that generation of listeners who discovered the sides with Lester through a lp compendium called SWING! — on Victor, with notes by Dan Morgenstern. I think I was not alone in listening around Una Mae, regarded at best as someone interfering with our ability to hear Lester, purring behind her. But if we could have shaken ourselves out of our Prez-worship for three minutes, we would have found much pleasure in Una Mae’s singing for its own sake, not in comparison to Billie. As I do now.
This small reconsideration of Carlisle’s talents springs from a nocturnal prowl through eBay, then on to YouTube, then Google, then here — a familiar path, although the stops are not always in that order.
First, an autographed postcard, 1940-2, when she was recording for Bluebird:
I then visited YouTube to find — to my delight — two brief but very entertaining film clips (from the 1948 BOARDING HOUSE BLUES) where her magnetism comes through:
I savor her ebullience — while trying to ignore the thinness of the song (which, in fairness, might be more sophisticated than GOT A PENNY, BENNY, which Nat Cole was singing a few years earlier) — and her expert piano work, with its small homages to Fats and Tatum.
I write the next sentence with mixed emotions: it cannot have hurt her fame in this period that she was slender and light-skinned. Had she lived, she might have achieved some of the acclaim given other singer-entertainers, although I wonder if her easy accessibility would have hampered her with the jazz purists of the Fifties, while making her a pop star of sorts. Certainly her last recordings (1950) show her being targeted for a large popular audience, which is to say the songs are awful and beyond.
The other song from BOARDING HOUSE BLUES is equally thin, built on RHYTHM changes — but it is not the THROW IT OUT YOUR MIND that Louis and the All-Stars performed in WHEN THE BOYS MEET THE GIRLS (1965):
Looking for more information on Una Mae, I found that others had — admiringly and sadly — done deep research here and elsewhere. Because the internet encourages such digressions, I now know more about mastoiditis than I would have otherwise. It shortened her life. The disease is now rare.
I present all this as a collage in tribute to someone who should not be forgotten. And I think of Una Mae as one of the talented people who died just short of great fame. I can imagine her, as I can imagine Hot Lips Page, on the television variety shows of my childhood, appearing in the nightclubs I was too young to go to.
Although the lyrics are those of a formulaic love song, the mood is apt for her epitaph. May she live on in our hearts:
Una Mae Carlisle, pianist (1915-1956)
Just like better-remembered contemporaries such as Fats Waller and Louis Jordan, Una Mae Carlisle made jazz that was also R&B and also pop — before the Billboard charts had effectively codified those genres. She was publicly known best as a singer, but she played virtuosic stride piano and composed prolifically too. Part black and part Native American, Carlisle was a pioneer in various ways, as Ms. Grantham pointed out. Carlisle was the first black woman to be credited as the composer of a song on the Billboard charts, and the first African-American to host her own regular, nationally broadcast radio show. She wrote for stars like Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee, and recorded her own hit singles, often with famous jazz musicians as her accompanists, before illness tragically shortened her career.
