[Dixielandjazz] Ruth Brown Obit

[Steve Barbone]

She was OKOM for some, like Wiggins and me, a hell of a gal as well as a
fine singer. Very funky. She was visible around the jazz & blues clubs on
Long Island back in the late 50's early 60's, then faded from sight, then
reemerged in the mid 1970's in Las Vegas and on the Broadway stage in NYC.

A strong willed survivor who swung like crazy yet never learned to read
music. She succeeded in her fight to recoup royalties for musicians who had
been cheated out of them by various record labels.

Sadly,
Steve Barbone


Ruth Brown, 78, a Queen of R&B, Dies

NY TIMES - By JON PARELES - November 18, 2006

Ruth Brown, the gutsy rhythm and blues singer whose career extended to
acting and crusading for musicians¹ rights, died on Friday in Las Vegas. She
was 78 and lived in Las Vegas.

The cause was complications following a heart attack and a stroke she
suffered after surgery, and Ms. Brown had been on life support since Oct.
29, said her friend, lawyer and executor, Howell Begle.

³She was one of the original divas,² said the singer Bonnie Raitt, who
worked with Ms. Brown and Mr. Begle to improve royalties for rhythm and
blues performers. ³I can¹t really say that I¹ve heard anyone that sounds
like Ruth, before or after. She was a combination of sass and innocence, and
she was extremely funky. She could really put it right on the beat, and the
tone of her voice was just mighty. And she had a great heart.²

³What I loved about her,² Ms. Raitt added, ³was her combination of
vulnerability and resilience and fighting spirit. It was not arrogance, but
she was just really not going to lay down and roll over for anyone.²

Ms. Brown sustained a career for six decades: first as a bright, bluesy
singer who was called ³the girl with a tear in her voice² and then, after
some lean years, as the embodiment of an earthy, indomitable black woman.
She had a life of hard work, hard luck, determination, audacity and style.
Sometimes it was said that R&B stood as much for Ruth Brown as it did for
rhythm and blues. 

As the 1950s began, Ms. Brown¹s singles for the fledgling Atlantic Records ‹
like ³(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean² and ³5-10-15 Hours² ‹ became both
the label¹s bankroll and templates for all of rock ¹n¹ roll. She could sound
as if she were hurting, or joyfully lusty, or both at once. Her voice was
forthright, feisty and ready for anything.

After Ms. Brown¹s string of hits ended, she kept singing but also went on to
a career in television, radio and movies ( including a memorable role as the
disc jockey Motormouth Maybelle in John Waters¹s ³Hairspray²) and on
Broadway, where she won a Tony Award for her part in ³Black and Blue.² She
worked clubs, concerts and festivals into the 21st century.

³Whatever I have to say, I get it said,² she said in an interview with The
New York Times in 1995. ³Like the old spirituals say, ŒI¹ve gone too far to
turn me ¹round now.¹ ²

Ms. Brown was born Ruth Weston on Jan. 12, 1928, in Portsmouth, Va., the
oldest of seven children. She made her debut when she was 4, and her father,
the choir director at the local Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church,
lifted her onto the church piano. In summers, she and her siblings picked
cotton at her grandmother¹s farm in North Carolina. ³That made me the strong
woman I am,² she said in 1995.

As a teenager, she would tell her family she was going to choir practice and
perform instead at U.S.O. clubs at nearby naval stations. She ran away from
home at 17, working with a trumpeter named Jimmy Brown and using his last
name onstage. She married him, or thought she did; he was already married.
But she was making a reputation as Ruth Brown, and the name stuck.

The big-band leader Lucky Millinder heard her in Detroit late in 1946, hired
her for his band and fired her in Washington, D.C. . Stranded, she managed
to find a club engagement at the Crystal Caverns. There, the disc jockey
Willis Conover, who broadcast jazz internationally on Voice of America
radio, heard Ms. Brown and recommended her to friends at Atlantic Records.

On the way to New York City, however, she was seriously injured in an
automobile accident and hospitalized for most of a year; her legs, which
were smashed, would be painful for the rest of her life. She stood on
crutches in 1949 to record her first session for Atlantic, and the bluesy
ballad ³So Long² became a hit.

She wanted to keep singing ballads, but Atlantic pushed her to try upbeat
songs, and she tore into them. During the sessions for ³Teardrops From My
Eyes,² her voice cracked upward to a squeal. Herb Abramson of Atlantic
Records liked it, called it a ³tear,² and after ³Teardrops² reached No. 1 on
the rhythm and blues chart, the sound became her trademark for a string of
hits. 

³If I was getting ready to go and record and I had a bad throat, they¹d say,
ŒGood!¹,² she once recalled.

Ms. Brown was the best-selling black female performer of the early 1950s,
even though, in that segregated era, many of her songs were picked up and
redone by white singers, like Patti Page and Georgia Gibbs, in tamer
versions that became pop hits. The pop singer Frankie Laine gave her a
lasting nickname: Miss Rhythm.

Working the rhythm and blues circuit in the 1950s, when dozens of her
singles reached the R&B Top 10, Ms. Brown drove a Cadillac and had romances
with stars like the saxophonist Willis (Gator Tail) Jackson and the singer
Clyde McPhatter of the Drifters. (Her first son, Ronald, was given the last
name Jackson; decades later, she told him he was actually Mr. McPhatter¹s
son, and he now sings with a latter-day lineup of the Drifters.)

In 1955 Ms. Brown married Earl Swanson, a saxophonist, and had a second son,
Earl; the marriage ended in divorce. Her two sons survive her: Mr. Jackson,
who has three children, of Los Angeles, and Mr. Swanson of Las Vegas. She is
also survived by four siblings: Delia Weston of Las Vegas, Leonard Weston of
Long Island and Alvin and Benjamin Weston of Portsmouth.

Her streak of hits ended soon after the 1960s began. She lived on Long
Island, raised her sons, worked as a teacher¹s aide and a maid and was
married for three years to a police officer, Bill Blunt. On weekends she
sang club dates in the New York area, and she recorded an album in 1968 with
the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band. Although her hits had supported Atlantic
Records ‹ sometimes called the House That Ruth Built ‹ she was unable at one
point to afford a home telephone.

The comedian Redd Foxx, whom she had once helped out of a financial jam,
invited her to Los Angeles in 1975 to play the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson
in ³Selma,² a musical about civil rights he was producing.

She went on to sing in Las Vegas and continued a comeback that never ended.
The television producer Norman Lear gave her a role in the sitcom ³Hello,
Larry.² She returned to New York City in 1982, appearing in Off Broadway
productions including ³Stagger Lee,² and in 1985 she went to Paris to
perform in the revue ³Black and Blue,² rejoining it later for its Broadway
run.

Ms. Brown began to speak out, onstage and in interviews, about the
exploitative contracts musicians of her generation had signed. Many
hit-making musicians had not recouped debts to their labels, according to
record company accounting, and so were not receiving royalties at all.
Shortly before Atlantic held a 40th-birthday concert at Madison Square
Garden in 1988, the label agreed to waive unrecouped debts for Ms. Brown and
35 other musicians of her era and to pay 20 years of retroactive royalties.

Atlantic also contributed nearly $2 million to start the Rhythm and Blues
Foundation, which pushed other labels toward royalty reform and distributed
millions of dollars directly to musicians in need, although it has struggled
to sustain itself in recent years.

³Black and Blue² revitalized Ms. Brown¹s recording career, on labels
including Fantasy and Bullseye Blues. Her 1989 album ³Blues on Broadway² won
a Grammy Award for best jazz vocal performance, female. She was a radio host
on the public radio shows ³Harlem Hit Parade² and ³BluesStage.² In 1995 she
released her autobiography, ³Miss Rhythm² (Dutton), written with Andrew
Yule; it won the Gleason Award for music journalism. She was inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

She toured steadily, working concert halls, festivals and cabarets. This
year she recorded songs for the coming movie by John Sayles, ³Honeydripper,²
and was about to fly to Alabama to act in it when she became ill.

Ms. Brown never learned to read music. ³In school we had music classes, but
I ducked them,² she said in 1995. ³They were just a little too slow. I
didn¹t want to learn to read no note. I knew I could sing it. I woke up one
morning and I could sing.²