Blanche Calloway
Blanche Calloway ( born February 9, 1904 in Baltimore, Maryland, † December 16, 1978 ibid ) was an American jazz singer, bandleader and composer of Swing. It is regarded as one of the first women who have passed an all-male orchestra occupied.
Life and work
Blanche Calloway was the elder sister of singer and bandleader Cab Calloway. She studied music at the Morgan State College, which she left in 1923 to join a music group. She took since the mid- 1920s to 1935 with a variety of formations music. She competed in 1931 with Andy Kirk to lead his band and then formed her band, " Blanche Calloway and Her Joy Boys ," in which musicians such as Clarence Smith, Ben Webster, Clyde Hart, Cozy Cole and Mary Lou Williams participated. Together with the orchestras of Moten Kirk and she graduated in 1931 with the Joy Boys an East Coast tour. The band, which had also record under the name Fred Armstrong and His Syncopators was quite successful for some time; Cozy Cole, who remained two and a half years with Calloway, the Combo estimated at the time as "great" one. She lost musicians of the Moten band and had to terminate her orchestra in 1938; she worked as a solo artist on, then with a band at the Howard Theater in Washington, DC. From the 1950s to the 1970s, she worked as a manager for the singer Ruth Brown, as a disc jockey and later as program director of the station WMBM in Florida.
Cab Calloway named it as the reason for his entry into show -business. "Despite their talent and services they neither reached the success of her brother Cab still the popularity of pure Women's Bands, which was then tied up the attention of the audience. "
Disco Graphical Notes
- Blanche Calloway and her Joy Boys: Cab Calloway and Co. (RCA)
- Louis Armstrong: Louis Armstrong and the Blues Singers 1924-1930 ( Affinity )
Secondary literature
- Linda Dahl: Stormy Weather. The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazz Women. London: Quartet Books, 1984 ISBN 0-7043-2477-6.
- Frank Driggs & Chuck Haddix Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop - A History. Oxford: Oxford University, 2005; ISBN 978-0-19530-712-2
- Richard Cook & Brian Morton: The Penguin Guide To Jazz on CD London: Penguin, 2002 ( 6th edition )