Mildred Bailey

See also: Bailey

Mildred Bailey (of its true name Mildred Rinker) is a American Chanteuse, at the white and Indian origins, born in Tekoa (Washington) the February 27th 1907, and died of an heart attack with Poughkeepsie (New York) the December 12th 1951. It is the sister of singer Al Rinker (one of the members of the “Original Rhythm Boys” that one can hear in some recordings of Duke Ellington and of Paul Whiteman). Topic “Rockin' flesh” writes especially for it by Hoagy Carmichael in 1932 will be born its nickname “The Rockin' flesh lady” (well in agreement with its imposing physique!).

It was a singer in Californian reviews and with the radio before being committed, it also, in the orchestra of Paul Whiteman (1929). This collaboration is completed when she marries, in 1933, the xylophonist (then vibraphonist) Red Norvo (“Mr. Swing” for the amateurs of nickname: it will be thus “Mrs Swing”). But it belongs to the family orchestra only in 1936, after some engagements in other orchestras, and all while occurring in other formations (for example with (Benny Goodman in 1934 and 1937).

After its divorce, in 1939, one difficult period, punctuated opens by increasingly heavy health issues, due to the diabetes. It appears punctually in New Yorkean clubs and carries out some rounds, to cease any activity during the last decade of its existence.

One would like to do of them one of the black prototypes of these copious “mamas”, but it is not black (although it draws partially its inspiration at Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, that it has of it the intonation “bluesy” and the swing), its voice does not have the roughness of its models, it evolves/moves with agility in an acuter register, in a required style but without affetery. Little blues to its repertory, but the popular topics and old standards of jazz. Before the appearance of the large “cool” singers of the Fifties, it is incontestably the best white vocalist of the music known as black.

All its career being unrolled well before the microgroove, exist only quite partial and arbitrary anthologies, but also a specimen integral of its recordings for the Columbia firm of 1933 with 1940 honest and some editions (on the mark “Classics” in France, and on Proper in the United Kingdom).

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