[Dixielandjazz] Maxine Sullivan

[Steve Barbone]

Almost missed this on, a treasure.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Step Into the Attic. Enter the Jazz Age.
NY TIMES - By BERNICE YEUNG - January 28, 2007

In the spring of 2004, a tall and trim 31-year-old real estate developer and
investor from Harlem named Ed Poteat received a call from a broker about a
hot deal in the Morrisania section of the Bronx.

The broker was calling about a Neoclassical building on Ritter Place dating
from the early 20th century that was going on sale. The house was small but
attractive, its charcoal gray stucco set off by white-trimmed windows and
white columns flanking the front door. Mr. Poteat crunched some numbers,
dispatched an agent to survey the building and within 48 hours had agreed to
buy the property for $150,000.

For Mr. Poteat and his business partners, it was a typical transaction, so
much so that not until the fall did he even bother to block out a space in
his busy calendar to make his first visit to the house.

When he arrived that crisp September day, Paula Morris, the seller, was on
hand to give him a tour. As they strolled through the musty rooms, Mr.
Poteat admired the oak paneling in the dining room, the hardwood floors and
the hand-carved detailing that appeared throughout the house and gave it a
cozy, rustic feel. Upstairs, Mr. Poteat marveled at the carved door frames
leading to three large bedrooms.

Then Ms. Morris, a nurse who favors African prints in her dress and has a
short, caramel-colored Afro, led Mr. Poteat up a narrow staircase to the
attic. There, milk crate upon milk crate brimming with papers and
photographs was stacked nearly to the ceiling. Perhaps sensing his
bewilderment, she explained that her mother had been a famous jazz singer,
and that these were her things.

Down in the dining room, Mr. Poteat noticed a poster-size photograph hanging
on the wall. It was a reprint of Art Kane¹s iconic 1958 image, ³A Great Day
in Harlem,² showing 57 legendary jazz musicians posed in front of a
brownstone.

As Mr. Poteat remembers the moment, Ms. Morris pointed a finger at one of
the three women in the photo and announced: ³That was my mother right there.
Her name was Maxine Sullivan.²

Mr. Poteat, who was a young teenager when the singer died in 1987, had never
heard of Ms. Sullivan. But he knew that if she was included in the Art Kane
photograph, she must have been a jazz luminary, and that her papers, even in
such a messy and disorganized state, might constitute a forgotten chapter in
music history.

Seventy years ago, in 1937, Ms. Sullivan left her small Pennsylvania town
and first strode onto a New York stage. During the ensuing 50 years she
climbed to the heights of jazz ‹ and before Mr. Poteat lay the record of
that long journey, in at least three dozen stacked milk crates.

The Unused Ticket

In interviews given before her death, Maxine Sullivan liked to tell the
story of how the pint-size daughter of a barber from Homestead, a small town
near Pittsburgh, achieved international acclaim as a jazz singer.

During her late teens, after winning local singing contests and performing
with her uncle¹s band, she landed a gig at an eight-table former speakeasy
in Pittsburgh called the Benjamin Harrison Literary Club. Singing from table
to table, she earned $14 a week plus tips.

One night in late 1936, a pianist named Gladys Mosier came by the club and
encouraged Ms. Sullivan to try her singing where it really mattered, in New
York. It took Ms. Sullivan six months to save up enough for a weekend
excursion ticket, and she told no one that she was going, figuring that
she¹d probably be back in Pittsburgh in time for her regular engagement.

³I was innocent enough to figure that things would happen that fast,² she
told the author Arnold Shaw during an interview for a 1971 book, ³The Street
That Never Slept.²

Ms. Sullivan never used that return ticket. On her first day auditioning in
clubs along West 52nd Street, then known as Swing Street and the subject of
Mr. Shaw¹s book, she landed a job at the famous Onyx Club, singing for a
group led by John Kirby ‹ who eventually became the second of her four
husbands. Ms. Sullivan got her big break almost immediately, and her ascent
within the music industry was equally swift. In her first week in New York,
she made her debut recording with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, and it was
Mr. Thornhill who, in August 1937, suggested that she do a swing rendition
of the Scottish folk song ³Loch Lomond.² The song catapulted Ms. Sullivan to
international acclaim.

Hollywood came calling, too. The next year, Ms. Sullivan appeared in ³Going
Places² with Louis Armstrong and a pre-presidential Ronald Reagan, and in
1939 she was in ³St. Louis Blues² with Lloyd Nolan and Dorothy Lamour. Also
that year, Ms. Sullivan made it to Broadway with ³Swingin¹ the Dream,² a
jazzman¹s take on ³A Midsummer¹s Night¹s Dream.²

By 1940, she and Mr. Kirby were performing weekly on a national radio
program called ³Flow Gently Sweet Rhythm.² They were among the first black
jazz musicians to do so.

In the next decade, Ms. Sullivan performed at the Village Vanguard and the
supper club Le Ruban Bleu, played one-night engagements with Benny Carter,
and recorded with Decca and RCA Victor. She developed a reputation for being
a reliable and savvy performer with an understated but charming performance
style. 

³Maxine had a very pure, sweet voice, and she had a nice time sense, but she
wasn¹t very theatrical,² said Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of
Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, who knew Ms. Sullivan. ³Maxine didn¹t
scat, but I think she had a jazz sensibility.

³One thing about Maxine was that her personality was very compatible with
jazz musicians, because unlike some singers, she didn¹t demand a lot of
attention and she didn¹t elbow the musicians out of the way. She looked at
herself as one of them. She didn¹t put on any airs.²

The Good Words Club

In 1957, however, Ms. Sullivan stepped away from the music industry, to
devote herself full time to raising her daughter, then 12, and engaging in
community activities. She joined the local school board and served as P.T.A.
president, roles in which she was known by her birth name, Marietta
Williams, though it didn¹t take long for local residents to discover that
the cheery woman who patrolled the school hallways and helped out in the
cafeteria had been a renowned jazz singer.

³Her reputation in the performing arts is twin to her social consciousness,²
said Jim Bartow, a jazz guitarist. ³The vocal delivery, the smoothness, the
ease, that¹s the way she operated with everybody and everything.

³To have an interlude of being a mother and raising children and then coming
back, and using her organizational skills in the community, which were
legendary, having block parties, parties at her house ‹ in hindsight,
because you¹re in it, and you just don¹t know the good things that are
happening ‹ the quality that she represented was big time, big league, and
rare.² 

During those years, Ms. Sullivan¹s home at 818 Ritter Place became the
headquarters of her community organizing. She held neighborhood parties
there, as well as meetings of a group she called the Good Words Club, in
which she taught children vocabulary words and asked them to read poetry
aloud to a rhythm. 

Still, jazz remained a crucial part of her life. Her fourth husband, the
stride pianist Cliff Jackson, recorded with J. C. Higginbotham and Dizzy
Gillespie, and the couple were frequently surrounded by their musician
friends. Sometimes, when the jazzmen jammed at the Ritter Place house, Ms.
Sullivan wandered through the room to offer a brief melody or a lyric.

³Growing up, I never knew she was really something,² one former neighborhood
kid, Samuel Christian, said in an interview with the Fordham University
Bronx African-American History Project early last year. ³She was just this
lady with this wonderful house that I liked to go to. She had a house with a
fireplace and even today, I can smell the space.²

Said her daughter: ³She had a keen sense of getting people organized. Her
main thing was to get the children involved.²

The couple also supported jazz musicians through a two-story house they
owned nearby on Stebbins Avenue, which had been converted into a
boardinghouse for musicians like the trombonist Vic Dickenson and the
drummer Marquis Foster.

When Mr. Jackson died in 1970, Ms. Sullivan decided to open a jazz community
center and museum dedicated to her late husband in the apartment on Stebbins
Avenue. The grand opening for the space, which she called the House That
Jazz Built, took place on July 19, 1975, with a party featuring the World¹s
Greatest Jazz Band and, naturally, Ms. Sullivan on vocals.

Even as her singing career was experiencing a revival ‹ notable moments
included her Tony Award nomination for her performance in ³My Old Friends²
on Broadway, performances with Buck Clayton and J. C. Higginbotham, and
three Grammy nominations ‹ her primary focus remained the House That Jazz
Built. 

Music and Milk Crates

After some extensive renovations, Mr. Poteat sold the little house on Ritter
Place last summer. Knowing that it would soon be turned over to another
owner, he decided last September to give it a quick walk-through.

Unlocking the padlocked door, he stepped into a dim and dusty entry hall.
Suddenly, he remembered the memorabilia collection in the attic. He assumed
that Ms. Morris had had them carted away to storage somewhere, but when he
made his way up to the attic, there sat the mounds of crates.

He began to examine the boxes¹ contents. There were notes written in Ms.
Sullivan¹s tidy hand, fading music manuscripts, bills addressed to Marietta
Williams, press clippings detailing Ms. Sullivan¹s career, old magazines,
sealed manila envelopes and odd scraps of paper. Some items seemed to
disintegrate as he touched them.

Though Ms. Sullivan¹s career had ebbed and flowed over the years, this
closer look at the crates made Mr. Poteat realize something: Ms. Sullivan
had saved seemingly every item that came into her hands. The always-growing
pile of memorabilia had come to include Mr. Jackson¹s musical manuscripts,
programs from performances, a letter filled with lyrics-in-progress from the
ragtime pianist and jazz composer Eubie Blake, a get-well card from the
bassist Milt Hinton, a congratulatory note from Ronald Reagan, and reels of
audiotape from her radio appearances.

More digging revealed sealed envelopes, personal correspondence and
notebooks filled with Ms. Sullivan¹s ideas and plans. ³The feeling that
you¹re going through someone¹s diary, that¹s the feeling I got,² Mr. Poteat
said during an October visit to the memorabilia collection, as he leafed
through some newspaper clippings.

In a gray duffel bag, he found a pile of photo negatives and slides of
performances, including Art Blakey at the Café Society and Fletcher
Henderson at the Cotton Club. ³You¹d need a jazz archivist to sit here and
grab a week and sort through this stuff,² Mr. Poteat said.

With the impending sale of the house, Mr. Poteat wanted to return everything
to Ms. Morris, but the only telephone number he had for her was the one for
the disconnected phone in the Ritter Place house. Nor was she listed in the
phone book.

³I think, at least I hope, that they took the most valuable personal
pieces,² Mr. Poteat said. ³Maybe it was just such a headache to move all
this stuff.²

To put the items into safekeeping, Mr. Poteat called a moving company the
next day and directed the workers to pack up the contents of the attic and
transport them to the basement of an apartment building he owned in Central
Harlem. Within hours, Ms. Sullivan¹s teetering stack of memorabilia had
found a temporary home in a basement on West 149th Street. Speaking from her
new three-bedroom apartment on Frederick Douglass Boulevard near 148th
Street, where she lives with her brother, Orville Williams, Paula Morris
said that she had indeed put most of the collection in storage.

³It¹s a lot,² Ms. Morris explained. ³An attic full. First of all, you don¹t
know what it is. And what I might think is garbage, might be of interest to
people. You just want to close your eyes and pretend it¹s not there. I mean,
it¹s impossible. To go through one box, it¹s overwhelming.²

As for the crates that had been left in the attic on Ritter Place, Ms.
Morris said she had been ³very busy² but was in the process of getting them
back. In mid-January she said that she had ³places in mind² to which to
donate the collection and intended to call Mr. Poteat about moving it from
his basement ³within the next couple of months.² Mr. Poteat said, ³I just
want to make sure that it¹s not in a trash heap somewhere ‹ or in my
basement.² 

Wherever the papers ultimately end up, the episode turns out to be something
of a tradition at 818 Ritter Place.

In 1980, Ms. Sullivan gave 15 hours of interviews for a project sponsored by
the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies. It turns out that the jazz singer had
bought the house, in 1945, from the musician Eddie Mallory, who was married
to the singer Ethel Waters. Like Mr. Poteat after her, Ms. Sullivan was
surprised to find that Mr. Mallory has accumulated a cache of music
memorabilia at the house.

³I found a lot of Ethel Waters recordings here,² Ms. Sullivan told the
Rutgers interviewer. ³I think the very first recording she ever made was
here, because I bought the house furnished. I have one of the first records
she made of ŒAm I Blue.¹ ²

The new owner of 818 Ritter, according to city property records, is also an
entertainer, an up-and-coming comedian and actor named Godfrey Danchimah.
Mr. Danchimah, 37, who has appeared in the films ³Johnson Family Vacation²
and ³Zoolander,² moved in late last fall. If he ever sells the place, it
will only be fitting if he leaves a few things behind.