On October 29th, we celebrated the life and times of Hadda Brooks (October 29, 1916 – November 21, 2002); an African-American pianist, vocalist and composer. Her first single, Swingin the Boogie, which she composed, was issued in 1945. She was billed as Queen of the Boogie. She sang at Hawaiis official statehood ceremony in 1959 and was reportedly asked for a private audience by Pope Pius XII. She was born Hattie L. Hapgood and raised in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles, by her parents, who had migrated to California from the South. Her mother, Goldie Wright, was a doctor and her father, John Hapgood, a deputy sheriff. Her grandfather, Samuel Alexander Hapgood (October 22, 1857 – November 30, 1944), moved to California from Atlanta, Georgia, and proved to be an enormous influence on Brooks. He introduced her to theater and the operatic voices of Amelita Galli-Curci and Enrico Caruso. In her youth she formally studied classical music with an Italian piano instructor, Florence Bruni, with whom she trained for twenty years. She attended the University of Chicago, and later returned to Los Angeles. She came to love the subtle comedy of black theater and vaudeville entertainer and singer Bert Williams. Brooks began playing piano professionally in the early 1940s at a tap-dance studio owned by Hollywood choreographer and dancer Willie Covan. For ten dollars a week, she played the popular tunes of the day while Covan worked with such stars as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Shirley Temple. Brooks was married briefly during this period to a Harlem Globetrotter named Earl Shug Morrison in 1941. She toured with the team when they traveled. Morrison developed pulmonary pneumonia, however, and died about a year after they were married. It was Brooks only marriage. Brooks actually preferred ballads to boogie-woogie, but worked up her style by listening to Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis records. Her first recording, the pounding Swingin the Boogie, for Jules Biharis Modern Records, was a sizable regional hit in 1945, and another R&B Top Ten with Out of the Blue, her most famous song. It was Jules Bihari who gave her the recording name Hadda Brooks. Clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman recommended Brooks to a film director friend of his who placed her in the film Out of the Blue in 1947. Encouraged by orchestra leader Charlie Barnet, Brooks practiced singing You Wont Let Me Go, and the song became her first vocal recording in 1947. She usually played the small part of a lounge piano player in films, and often sang the title song. Out of the Blue became a top hit for Brooks, Boogie Woogie Blues followed in 1948, and she appeared in In a Lonely Place (1950) starring Humphrey Bogart, and in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) with Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas. She was the second African-American woman to host her own television show -- after Hazel Scott with The Hazel Scott Show on DuMont in 1950 -- with The Hadda Brooks Show (1957), a combination talk and musical entertainment show, aired on Los Angeles KCOP-TV. The show opened with Brooks seated behind a grand piano, cigarette smoke curling about her, and featured Thats My Desire as her theme song. She appeared in 26 half-hour episodes of the show, which were broadcast live in Los Angeles and repeated on KGO-TV in San Francisco. In the 1970s, she commuted to Europe for performances in nightclubs and festivals, but performed rarely in the United States, living for many years in Australia and Hawaii. Following the 1984 release of Queen of the Boogie a compilation of recordings from the 40s, two years later manager Alan Eichler brought her out of a 16-year retirement to open a new jazz room at the historic Perinos in Los Angeles, after which she continued to play nightclubs regularly in Hollywood, San Francisco, and New York, to rave reviews. In 1993, Brooks was presented with the prestigious Pioneer Award by Bonnie Raitt on behalf of the Smithsonian-based Rhythm and Blues Foundation, in a ceremony held at the Hollywood Palace. Brooks returned to movies with a cameo in the Jack Nicholson film, The Crossing Guard (1995), directed by Sean Penn, in which she sang Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere. Three years later she made another singing appearance in The Thirteenth Floor (1999). Her last performance on screen was an acting role in John John in the Sky (2000). In 2000, the Los Angeles Music Awards honored Hadda Brooks with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Hadda Brooks died at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles, following open-heart surgery at age 86. In 2007, a 72-minute documentary, Queen of the Boogie, directed by Austin Young & Barry Pett, was presented at the Los Angeles Silver Lake Film Festival.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:27:53 +0000
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