Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)!

This will be a summary of the career of one of the more lovable and ahead of her time performers of my favorite era, the WWII years. Ella Mae Morse’s name may not ring bells with many today, but she was a pretty hot property back in the day, and not just because of her looks. This gal could sing, and not only that, she knew about the sounds coming from the other side of the tracks.

It was a fairly short recording career, sadly. The ball got rolling in 1938, when a 14 year old Ella Mae was hired by esteemed big band leader Jimmy Dorsey under false pretenses. The buxom lass had no problem convincing Jimmy that she was 19. That didn’t end well, but by 1942 the hip and talented singer was working with soon to be huge boogie-woogie piano phenom Freddie Slack.

If you’re not familiar with this era, this was a time of intense change musically, even with the popular stuff that got played on the radio. Boogie-woogie became a pretty big craze, with both the real thing and bastardized big band versions selling well. Freddie Slack was in on the ground floor of this, tickling the ivories on 1940’s “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar”, a big band classic that was in everyone’s ears that year.

Slack got to be so popular that he was able to form his own big band in 1942, which is where Ella Mae Morse really got her groove on. This was also the era during which the seeds were being sown for the rise of the independent record labels, so important in the development of what was to become known as rock and roll music. Freddie Slack’s band, with the young and hip Ella Mae Morse, was signed to upstart Capitol records, not exactly an independent in strict terms, but definitely a new thing at the time. Slack and Morse put Capitol on the map with their first release, “Cow Cow Boogie”, which sold a million and was Capitol’s first gold record.

“Cow Cow Boogie” was a hugely influential record, and made Ella Mae a star. Morse’s voice was amazing. You can hear traces of Ella Fitzgerald and even Billie Holliday, along with some of the more seedy elements that would inform rock and roll by way of guys like Louis Jordan and Wynonie Harris a few years later. Many didn’t know that this was a white girl.

Morse would continue to have success until around the mid-1950’s. In 1946, her recording of “House of Blue Lights”, again with Freddie Slack, was even more redolent of the music of Harlem and beyond. There’s a spoken introduction with her and Slack, in which Ella Mae utters the word “homie” perhaps for the first time on record. This gal was shameless in her ability to pull off music most identified with black artists, and, most surprisingly, it sold like crazy. One can only imagine what her folks back home in Oklahoma thought of all this at the time.

Ella Mae Morse was an enigma really. Few artists, male or female, black or white, were fusing musical elements the way that she was. The Andrews Sisters made music in a similar vein I guess, but it has nowhere near the level of authenticity as Ella Mae’s. Morse was simply a singer ahead of her time, and willing and able to use what she heard and liked best to make herself marketable. She clearly loved music from the wrong side of town.

I’ll foist a few clips here, the tunes I’ve mentioned. We’ll hear one tune twice, as the later version is maybe the most fun of all. It’s 1950’s TV phenom Liberace, welcoming Ella Mae with his naughty left hand and a band awash with strings. Ella Mae sings her ass off, and at the end gives Liberace a big ol’ smooch on the lips, all the better to maintain the illusion that he wasn’t a flaming homosexual person. Different times…

Alright, so here’s Ella Mae at the height of her teenage powers, killin’ it on “Cow Cow Boogie”. This clip is actually from a few years later I’m guessing, likely mid-late 40s, a different performance than the original hit:

“House of Blue Lights” was probably considered even more morally reprehensible at the time. “Homie” indeed…

The Liberace clip of “Cow Cow Boogie”. Loco weed and closeted gays. My goodness:

How about that, huh? Great sounding clip if you feed it to good speakers. And ol’ Lee is hilarious! The whole band situation looks like a little playhouse of wonders for a guy like Liberace. His brief superstardom phase was almost over. TV was very weird early on…

Hope you enjoyed today’s exercise in futility, another retread if you hadn’t guessed. Soon we may become popular enough that I put actual effort into these rather than simply reheating leftovers. Or not… Who can know?

C’mon back anyway and see what happens though. I’m here every day. What else am I gonna do? It’s 102 motherfucking degrees out there today, with air like breathing cheese, today a very runny brie that I want no part of. Same expected tomorrow, which I see is now today. It’ll be a much better day though. Today (yesterday now) sucked hard…