Unsung Vocalists of the Past 1: Seger Ellis

We begin a new series of articles, spotlighting singers whose popularity has faded over the years and who, for different reasons, have unjustly fallen into obscurity. With the help of a very interesting CD released by The Old Masters and entitled Jazz in a Sentimental Mood, the first entry in the series is devoted to the lesser-known but great Houston-born vocalist/songwriter/pianist Seger Ellis.

At the outset of his career, Seger Ellis did not really want to be a singer. Rather, his main interest lay in writing songs and playing the piano, and it was indeed as a pianist with the now forgotten Lloyd Finlay Orchestra that he made his first recordings in 1925 in his native Houston for Victor. In addition to the sides he cut as part of the Finlay band, Ellis was asked to make some piano solo recordings, which were never issued due to technical difficulties during the recording process. However, Ellis would soon be summoned to Camden, New Jersey, by the label to wax his piano solos again, this time using the then newly introduced electrical recording method, and upon their release, these records were sufficiently well received by the public to persuade Ellis to launch a professional career as a recording artist in New York City. Incidentally, these early piano solos, most of which were written by Ellis himself, can be found in the excellent CD Black and White Piano, Volume 1 (Document Records, 1998), a highly recommendable collection that also includes cuts by Clarence M. James, Sidney Williams, and Lovin' Sam Theard, among other obscure 1920s pianists.

It should be noted that Ellis' intention at this stage was still to sell himself as a pianist, not as a singer. This would soon change, though, when he was encouraged by the small radio station on which he was appearing to sing as well as playing piano over the air. Thus, after his move to New York, when he made his first recordings for Columbia, the company decided to promote him as a crooner, marketing his records to rival those of Gene Austin, who was one of the foremost vocalists of the late 1920s, with smash hits such as "My Blue Heaven," "I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling," and "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue." Columbia's marketing efforts most likely explain why Ellis' voice sounds so high-pitched on his Columbia and Okeh records: this was a conscious attempt to make Ellis sound like other popular crooners of the era, such as Austin, Nick Lucas, Johnny Marvin, and Little Jack Little. In his excellent liner notes for the CD Jazz in a Sentimental Mood, Allan Dodge hints at the fact that Ellis was not thrilled by the sound of his voice on these sides, but he kept cultivating that style in view of the success of the records.

One of the attractions of Ellis' recorded output for Columbia and Okeh lies in the amazing personnel that accompanied him on most of the sessions, featuring some of New York's most prominent jazz musicians of the time. It appears that Ellis was granted the power to choose the members of the studio band for his recordings, and if that is the case, he certainly had a keen ear for good jazz, since he was often backed by highly accomplished musicians like Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Eddie Lang, Joe Venuti, Rube Bloom, Manny Klein, Hoagy Carmichael, and Muggsy Spanier, many of whom would go on to greater things during the Swing Era and beyond. Ellis himself played piano on some of the dates, and Eddie Lang's guitar is heavily featured on most of these very inspired arrangements, which are often quite adventurous, as in the case of Ellis' 1928 version of "Where the Shy Little Violets Grow," with an interesting steel guitar solo by Andy Sannella. In August of 1929, Ellis' studio band even included Louis Armstrong, who was then making his legendary series of hot five and seven recordings, on trumpet, and their reading of "Ain't Misbehavin'" remains one of Ellis' most enduring recordings.

At the time of this writing, there is only one full-length CD devoted to the music of Seger Ellis: Jazz in a Sentimental Mood, produced by the reissue label The Old Masters. Its title accurately encapsulates the defining elements of Ellis' style: his recordings are often sentimental, characterized by his high-pitched voice and relaxed singing style, but there is an undeniable hotness to them, and they are full of jazzy solos by some of the most important jazz instrumentalists of the period. In my opinion, the jazzy quality of the arrangements is precisely what differentiates Ellis' recordings from those of Gene Austin, whose accompaniments were not always comparatively as jazz-oriented. Ellis' repertoire consists of some of the best pop songs written in the 1920s and '30s, and all of them are so enjoyable that it becomes rather hard to name any favorites. The collection includes sides cut over a four-year period, between 1928 and 1931, featuring gems such as "If I Can't Have You, " "Cheerful Little Earful," "I Wonder How It Feels?" and Ellis' beautiful, pensive version of "It's a Lonesome Old Town." The remastering of these old 78s is excellent, and so are Allan Dodge's informative liner notes, which provide some interesting background for the recordings.

Ellis' recording career came to an end during the early years of the Great Depression, although he did assemble a big band in the late 1930s, bearing the odd name of the Choir of Brass Orchestra and featuring his wife, Irene Taylor, as the vocalist. Interestingly, though he did not record his own songs for Columbia and Okeh, he remained active as a songwriter, composing popular songs like "Little Jack Frost Get Lost" and "You're All I Want for Christmas." He passed away in relative obscurity in Houston in 1995, but as the twenty-six songs included in Jazz in a Sentimental Mood clearly show, his very appealing, jazz-influenced singing deserves higher recognition that it has received.

Videos

There are several videos with Seger Ellis recordings available on YouTube, among which we recommend the piano solo "Shivery Stomp," "Here Am I (Broken Hearted)" (a tune also recorded by Johnnie Ray in the 1950s), "Should I?" and "Without You Sweetheart." There is even an interesting, though undated, radio interview with Seger Ellis and Smith Ballew recorded late in their careers.

"Here 'Tis!": Little Jack Little's 1952 Radio Transcriptions

Most histories of jazz and popular singing written these days make absolutely no mention of Little Jack Little, but in the 1920s and 1930s, he was a very popular artist both on records and in the rapidly rising medium of radio, captivating the ears of thousands of listeners with his very personal style of crooning. In his introductory chapter to the book The Rise of the Crooners, Ian Whitcomb places Little within a triumvirate of 1920s pioneering radio crooners alongside Whispering Jack Smith and Art Gillham, noting that "the music and radio trade appreciated his tongue-in-cheek approach to the clichés of the newly streamlined pop song" (20). Such appreciation, though, faded rather quickly, and today the only CD release available by Little is an outstanding collection of radio transcriptions made in New York for the Lang-Worth Company in 1952, less than four years before his death, which will provide the musical background for this article.

Little Jack Little was born John Leonard in London in 1900, but soon thereafter, his family moved to the United States, and he was actually raised in Iowa. In the early years of his life, he quickly showed an interest in music, and while an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, he led a dance band. Not much later, we find him in Chicago working as a song plugger and trying to make a career in music. His big break came via radio broadcasting: his pleasant voice and soft singing style soon endeared him to an ever-growing listening audience, and after the introduction of the electric microphone, Little realized that his voice was also perfect for records. Like Art Gillham's, Little's radio broadcasts came across as informal mixtures of song and chatter, and his gentle approach to vocalizing made his audience feel as though he were singing directly to each and every single listener. Soon he acquired the moniker of "the Cheerful Little Earful," making constant use of catchphrases such as "Here 'tis!," with which he prefaced his performances, and "Yours truly, Little Jack Little," which he invariably employed to conclude his broadcasts.


Though Little may conceivably be compared with Whispering Jack Smith due to the similarity of their singing styles, it should be noted that, unlike Smith, Little did not so much whisper as speak out the lyrics with a syncopated inflection, dividing syllables in an inventive way and often cutting words short at odd places for rhythmic effect. He was also a much more proficient pianist than Smith, with a playing style full of cascading runs and jazzy rhythmic embellishments that are somehow reminiscent of the great Art Tatum. Little also made his mark as a songwriter, producing several hit tunes, the most enduring of which are "Jealous" and, particularly, "In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town."

His recorded legacy is not vast, yet the quality of his records, sometimes backed by a full band and sometimes showcasing him singing to his own piano accompaniment, is consistently high, although his recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, alas, remain unissued to this day. In the early thirties, the coming of crooners such as Russ Columbo, Rudy Vallee, and especially Bing Crosby, with a much more modern sound, spelled out the end of the careers of Little and his fellow crooning pioneers. While Gillham and Smith were slowly forced into retirement by this major turn in popular taste, Little was still performing in small nightclubs in the 1940s and even tried his hand at being a disc jockey for a while. The lack of success in these later years, though, would eventually take its toll, as Little Jack Little ended up committing suicide in 1956, leaving, as Don White and Ray Norman state in the liner notes to Little's only currently available CD, "a dozen notes indicating that he was greatly depressed."


As late as 1952, however, Little cut a series of transcription discs that would not be issued in digital format until 2002, when Circle Records dug them up and made them available in a volume aptly entitled A Cheerful Little Earful. Recorded in the course of two separate sessions held in July and September of 1952, these sides feature Little revisiting standards from the heyday of his career and sounding basically as he did back in the twenties and thirties, which makes these tracks particularly interesting if we bear in mind that his original recordings are not available on CD. These transcriptions are not elaborately produced, but they give us a chance to appreciate Little's personal vocal style in a mostly unchanged form, complete with his classic "Here 'tis!" and "Yours very truly, Little Jack Little" radio catchphrases. Accompanied by Eddie Safranski on bass on some of the cuts, Little performs a few of his own hits and covers standards that were introduced by other artists, such as "Walkin' My Baby Back Home," "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue," and "Yes Sir, That's My Baby." These transcription sessions also yielded several piano solos ("Dardanella," Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady," and an instrumental version of the classic "Paradise," to name but three) that attest to Little's talent as an elegantly jazzy pianist that knows how to play around with a tune without ever losing sight of the melody.

The liner notes by White and Norman offer interesting information on the crooner's life, as well as on the songs included in the collection, and they explicitly bemoan the fact that Little and other contemporaries like Harry Richman, Seger Ellis, and Irving Kaufman "seem to be little remembered today." And in the light of these radio transcriptions, the fact that Little Jack Little remains so unknown and underappreciated today is rather shocking and definitely unfair. Hopefully, some reissue label will soon decide to right that wrong and make his vintage recordings available again.

Works Cited

Whitcomb, Ian. "The Coming of the Crooners." In Michael Pitts and Frank Hoffman. The Rise of the Crooners. Lanham, MD and London: Scarecrow Press, 2002: 1-49.

White, Don and Ray Norman. "Liner Notes to A Cheerful Little Earful. Circle Records, 2002.

Videos

LITTLE JACK LITTLE SINGS SOME OF HIS HITS (Posted on YouTube by ednayarkspay)



I'M IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Posted on YouTube by edmundusrex)



I'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO WALTZ IN BERLIN (Posted on YouTube by warholsoup100)



I WISHED ON THE MOON (Posted on YouTube by warholsoup100)