Once Again Tell Me Good Morning Hunter
Fame Comes, Once more, to Alberta Hunter
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November 25, 1978
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By mean solar day the prowls the meat section at Macy's, inspecting veal chops and spareribs, lugging a shopping bag and shuffling along on feet that move as though they hurt. She likes to ride the city s buses, as well: a tiny old lady with a woolen cap pulled down over her ears and a faraway wait on her face up.
She might be humming an near inaudible tune under her breath, though more likely she is singing merely in her head.
Only should you catch a stray wisp of melody, listen closely, for the petty old lady is the venerable jazz and dejection smashing, Alberta Hunter. After twenty years of obscurity, the 83‐twelvemonth‐erstwhile singer is once again in the limelight, and, says she, "I'thou the happiest woman in this world." During the day she may expect anonymous, just at night Miss Hunter does two shows (three on weekends) at The Cookery, where she delivers the sexiest renditions in town of such numbers equally "I want a two‐fisted, doublejointed, rough‐and‐ready human being" — slapping her thigh, clapping her hands with their blood‐ruddy talons, flashing a wicked wink and sending her audiences into paroxysms of adulation and whistles.
On December. 3 she is going to the White House for the first fourth dimension. She was asked one time before, but it was for a Sunday; she said that was her day of residuum, and turned it down. This time the occasion is a Kennedy Center Honors gala at which Miss Hunter's old friend Marian Anderson volition exist amid the honorees. And so, although this invitation. too, is for Sunday, the dejection vocalizer has agreed to attend the White Firm reception, later which she volition appear (forth with such other artists as Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern) at the gala to sing for her President: "Bless his ole heart," she says gleefully. "I'one thousand gonna lay information technology on 'im!"
Meanwhile, there is fifty-fifty speculation that Miss Hunter might receive an University Honor nomination for the score of her first moving picture, Robert Altman'southward "Retrieve My Name." She composed and performed all the songs for it, despite the fact that she can neither read nor write music. When the moving picture opened in Memphis a few weeks ago, a statewide Alberta Hunter Day was declared and she was given the keys to her native city. "I don't have the words to tell yous; you'll never know how I felt," says Miss Hunter softly, shaking her head.
The daughter of a maid in a Memphis whorehouse, she ran away from dwelling house at age 11 because she'd heard that singers in Chicago were making $x a week. Her youth and diminutive size nonetheless, Miss Hunter (at the time still known by her childhood nickname, Pig) managed to land a job at a identify called Dago Frank's, whose habitués consisted mainly of pickpockets, smalltime gangsters and ladies of the evening. Only it seems this unlikely collection of substitute parents was as solicitous every bit maiden aunts, admonishing little Alberta never to take gifts from gentlemen and to live a clean life—and to this mean solar day, Miss Hunter vows, she has never smoked or drunk booze ('I hate the smell of information technology').
Dago Frank's, of class, was only the beginning, to exist followed past appearances at Chicago'due south Dreamland (where Al Jolson came to hear Miss Hunter sing "St. Louis Blues" and Sophie Tucker to mind to "A Good Man Is Hard to Observe'), recordings with Eubie Blake, Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and in 1923 a move to New York. Inside 4 days she had replaced Bessie Smith on Broadway in "How Come." Miss Smith also helped launch Alberta Hunter as a songwriter when she chose Miss Hunter's "Downhearted Blues" for her offset Columbia recording. It sold a meg copies within months, "and I'one thousand notwithstanding collecting the royalties," Miss Hunter Says with cackle. "I'm besides slick to let 'em cheat me outta that!"
From at that place it was on to London, where she starred in "Showboat" with Paul Robeson, and drew the Prince of Wales and Noel Coward to hear her night afterwards dark at the Dorchester; to Paris, where she replaced Josephine Bakery at the Folies Bergeres; and throughout Europe and Asia on bout later tour. Miss Hunter was married once ('Once is enough') to a Chicago waiter who later became a labor wedlock official, but she left him after two weeks for a booking in Monte Carlo and never came back. She has no children, but was very close to her own mother, and when she died in 1959 the loss precipitated a sudden and total alter in Miss Hunter's life.
Today she simply smiles and shrugs when asked why she did what she did, but three days after her mother'south funeral Miss Hunter enrolled in school, became a applied nurse and gave up singing — forever, she thought. For more than than 23 years Alberta Hunter worked happily as a scrub nurse at Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, where no 1 had whatever idea of her exotic past. Nor did they accept much idea of her age; when they finally insisted she retire final year, the hospital administrators believed Miss Hunter had reached the mandatory retirement historic period of seventy.. "I was 82," Miss Hunter announces smugly.
She was too "bored to tears" by her enforced idleness, and when she ran into some old musical cronies at political party for Mabel Mercer (a friend for some 50 years), one of them passed the discussion along to the 76‐year‐old jazz impresario Barney Josephson, who had known Miss Hunter decades ago. He chosen her the next morning and asked her to come and sing at The Cookery. Despite her protests ('I didn't fifty-fifty hum in the bathtub for twenty years!'), Miss Hunter opened there in Octobei. of 1977, and except for a couple of cursory vacations she'southward been at that place always since. A European tour for next spring is now existence discussed: "She's wanted all over the world — Copenhagen, Leningrad, Berlin, Tokyo, everywhere!" says Mr. Josephson (who then goes off to answer a telephone phone call from Ray Charles's managing director; Mr. Charles, it seems, is interested in recording a new Hunter tune she had sung on the "Today" show a few days earlier).
Meanwhile the sprightly singer is taking information technology all in stride, turning down the limousine Mr. Josephson offered in favor of her usual tram ride from her apartment on Roosevelt Island, continuing to brand her daily pilgrimage to such favorite hangouts as Macy'south, spending her mornings on the phone with old friends like Bricktop, the cabaret vocaliser, and and then going back to the infirmary "to see some of my patients." But at nighttime she dons her enormous gold hoop earrings and sings the blues, her rich contralto vibrating with a passion that often brings tears to people's optics.
Miss Hunter snOrts derisively when anyone asks well-nigh personal parallels with the heartbreak songs she does so well. "I never did accept the blues about no man in my entire life! Even if I got sad, I'd never let them know it."
Be that as information technology may, other songs are clearly true to life, similar the Hunter staple that goes, "Don't try to tame me/Let me accept my fun … I'1000 having a expert time/Living my life today/ Considering tomorrow I may die …" Alberta Hunter glances slyly effectually the room at her rapt audience, and purrs, "And I own't passin' nothin' past!"
The New York Times/ D. Gorton
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/11/25/archives/fame-comes-again-to-alberta-hunter-ran-away-from-home-no-limousine.html
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