Sophie Tucker, The Last of the Red Hot Mamas, was born Sonya Kalish to a Russian-Jewish family on January 13. The year was either 1884 or 1886. Family legend has it that baby Sonya was born along the road somewhere in Russia or Poland during her family’s flight to the United States. Family legend also explains the name change from Kalish to Abuza during this time, as Sophie’s father sought to avoid detection by borrowing the identity of an Italian friend he met along the way. One of her first jobs was at the 125th Street Theater, where her strong contralto voice made her a powerful Coon Shouter, a white performer who in the style of the day appeared as a blackfaced minstrel. Although Tucker asked to perform without blackface, she was told that she was too big and ugly. Yet, Tucker’s skill as a performer earned her increasingly higher-paying jobs on the vaudeville and burlesque circuits, along with a brief stint in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1909. When one day her costume and makeup were lost in transit, the opportunity for her to perform without blackface presented itself. The audience took to her warmly. As Tucker later wrote in her autobiography, All the time I was singing five numbers, six, seven, then an eighth, inwardly I was exulting: I dont need blackface... Ill never black up again. (Sophie Tucker, Some of These Days: The Autobiography of Sophie Tucker (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1945), P. 63.) Sophie Tucker soon became known for both her husky voice and her outspoken comedy. When she first heard her own recorded voice she exclaimed, My God, I sound like a foghorn! In 1911 she recorded her hit song Some of These Days for the Edison Company. Written by African-American composer Sheldon Brooks, the piece became her theme a decade later. By 1914, Sophie Tucker was a major star, touring in the U.S. and abroad. Elaborately costumed, she perfected a bawdy performance style that blended ragtime and jazz, Yiddish popular culture, and sentimental ballads. Dozens of songs were written specifically for Tucker, especially by her long-time collaborator and lyricist Jack Yellen. Tuckers My Yiddische Momme (My Yiddish Mother), penned by Yellen and composer Lew Pollack in 1925, stirred such emotion and pride among European Jews that the Nazis eventually forbade the sale of its recordings. Throughout her life Sophie Tucker was known to be very generous. She bought lavishly for herself, her family, and friends—her parents, for example, were able to give up their restaurant early in her career. Tucker espoused the practice of tzedakah (charity), the duty of a Jew to establish justice through compassion. Through benefit concerts she raised money for servicemen during World War I, and years later donated to charity all the proceeds from her fiftieth-anniversary record album and her autobiography. Sophie Tucker, The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas as she called herself (based on another song by Yellen and composer Milton Ager), continued to perform on stage, on the radio, in movies, in recordings, and later on television into her eightieth year. She married and divorced three times, and counted her friends in the thousands. Tucker died on February 9, 1966, having lived through several major eras of the entertainment business. Her 1911 recording of Some of These Days was added to the National Recording Registry in 2004. https://youtube/watch?v=_PwH3Ep8DVQ
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 12:16:15 +0000
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