[Dixielandjazz] Dorothy Donegan

[Arnold Day]

Young man from England over to see the 1964 World's Fair in New York City.
Went to some club one evening and the entertainment was Dorothy Donegan on
piano and Dottie Dodgion on drums and vocals. What an evening! I decided
this was where I wanted to live and I emigrated here later that year and
soon thereafter married an American girl. She's a lousy pianist!
Arn

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Barbone" <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
To: "Dixieland Jazz Mailing List" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2004 9:41 AM
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Dorothy Donegan


>   List Mates:
>
> I originally sent this obit to Anton Crouch who asked about Dorothy
> Donegan. It was printed in the NY Times upon her passing in 1998. She
> was a MONSTER player. Better than most male jazz pianists, but because
> she was a woman, she never got a fair shake as a jazz performer. She
> could play any style you want, ragtime & boogie woogie included, (Like
> Dick Hyman) but had her own unique voice on the piano, and with her
> bawdy jokes and in your face style was something to behold in nightclub
> performances.
>
> Those who were with her when she died said that with her last breath,
> she raised her hands as if playing a final encore, and then lowered them
> and passed away.
>
> Cheers,
> Steve Barbone
>
> Anton: Here is her obit: She had more technique than most jazz pianists
> and a very out front performing style. Some must have rubbed off on me.
> I used to see her at the Embers in NYC in the 1950s.
>
> Incredible talent and she knew how to swing.
>
> Cheers,
> Steve
>
>
> Dorothy Donegan, 76, Flamboyant Jazz Pianist
>
> By BEN RATLIFF
>
> Dorothy Donegan, a jazz pianist who brashly mixed swing, boogie-woogie,
> vaudeville, pop, ragtime and Bach -- sometimes within a span of 10
> minutes -- and who was known for an outrageous sense of humor, died on
> Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 76.
>
> The cause was colon cancer, said The Associated Press.
>
> Ms. Donegan was better known as a performer than as a recording artist,
> and her flamboyance helped her find work in a field that was largely
> hostile to women. To a certain extent, it was also her downfall; her
> concerts were often criticized for having an excess of personality. She
> would act out songs, mocking their words; do devastating parodies of
> pianists and singers, especially if they were in the audience, or get up
> and shake her hips while keeping up a left-handed riff.
>
> She could push humor into brazenness and kept up a supply of off-color
> jokes. She told writers without hesitation that sexism caused her
> obscurity -- that, and her insistence on being paid at the same scale as
> her male colleagues.
>
> Born in Chicago, Ms. Donegan was encouraged from an early age by her
> mother to become a professional musician. She was a church organist as a
> girl, and at 14 she was playing for a dollar a night at the city's South
> Side bars. She was one of many notable jazz musicians inestimably helped
> by the tutelage of Walter Dyett, a music teacher at DuSable High School,
> whose other students included Dinah Washington, Johnny Griffin, Gene
> Ammons and Von Freeman.
>
> She played blues and boogie-woogie piano, even recording for the
> Bluebird label in 1942, but she aspired to be a classical concert
> pianist. She studied at the Chicago Conservatory and at the Chicago
> Musical College. In 1943, when she was 18, she gave a concert at
> Orchestra Hall in Chicago, the first black performer to do so. Time
> magazine covered the concert, and word about a pianist with a wide
> repertory and blizzard-fast fingers reached the jazz piano virtuoso Art
> Tatum, who came to her house to hear her play. Tatum showed her some of
> his technique and remained the strongest influence on her playing.
>
> Hollywood soon came calling. Persuaded by her agent to turn down a
> five-year contract from MGM, she accepted a $3,000-a-week contract from
> United Artists for one picture, "Sensations of 1945." She appears in a
> duet scene with another pianist, Gene Rodgers, and the band behind them
> was Cab Calloway's. That was the end of her film career.
>
> In the late 1950s she began a series of engagements at the Embers in
> Manhattan and the London House in Chicago. It was during this period
> that she developed her flamboyant performance style.
>
> By the 1970s she was more comfortable, making a living playing in
> festivals in America and Europe and attracting a fierce coterie of fans
> in New York. A resident of Los Angeles since the 1950s, she would return
> occasionally to the East Coast for nightclub performances or a
> jazz-festival or concert-hall event. After a Town Hall performance in
> 1971, John Wilson wrote in The New York Times that Ms. Donegan "showed a
> technical virtuosity that could be compared only to that of Art Tatum
> and a swinging drive that might be equaled by Mary Lou Williams."
>
> Ms. Donegan was married three times, and is survived by two sons, John
> and Donovan. Her last performances were in Monterey, Calif., last
> September, before diabetes and cancer rendered her too ill to play.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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