Texas Jazz Singer, Kevin Edward Mooney

(upbeat music) (music continues) (music continues) - Hello and welcome to "The Bookmark."

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is Kevin Mooney, author of "Texas Jazz Singer," "Louise Tobin in the Golden Age of Swing and Beyond."

Thank you so much for being here today.

- Thank you for having me.

- I'm so excited to talk about Louise.

I mean, her life is remarkable, and interesting, and fascinating.

But before we dive into her story, I wanna get your story about how the book came to be and how did you come to find her as a subject?

- Sure, sure, well, this goes back to 2009, and I was a keynote speaker for a Texas Music Conference in Dallas.

And I finished my talk, and a couple came up to me, Debra Porter and Mike Kubiak.

And they said, "You are just a person we've been looking for."

And I said, "What do you mean?"

Said, "Well, have you ever heard of Louise Tobin?"

And I hadn't.

And they said, "Well, she told me who she was, and we want to document her story.

And we need a historian, a musicologist, who can record her oral history.

Are you interested?"

I said, "Well, absolutely."

And so she set up a meeting, and on July 16th of that year, I met Louise for the first time and her son, Harry Junior, who's Harry James and Louise's first son greeted me at the door and with a big smile on his face and welcome and Louise is over here and there she was, this grand old woman she was in her 90s then.

And she just couldn't be nicer.

And we set up a video camera, and Deborah Porter, Mike Kubiak, myself, and Harry and the Wings, and started asking questions and hearing her story, and we didn't stop for three and a half hours.

And we only got to 1939.

And so I left there with my head spinning, and I thought there's a book here.

And indeed, Deb and I started to work on this project together, and did a lot of the interviews together, and ultimately we decided if this is going to get done, one of us is gonna have to take it.

And so we agreed that I'd be the one, and so I finished it up and ten years later, I mean, it was a long process with a lot of meetings with Louise, a lot of face-to-face, phone calls, she was always so generous with her time.

And then, you know, started to get a little impatient over the years, you know.

I'd get a Christmas card, you know, "Merry Christmas, how's the book coming?"

The next Thanksgiving, you know, where's the book underlined, you know?

So I was so pleased though to finish it and be able to hand it to her and it was so exciting.

And actually, I sent it to her right after I received it and then waited to hear from her.

And it wasn't for a couple of months, and of course, she was 102 at that point.

And maybe even by 103, I can't remember now.

And I got a phone call, and it was her granddaughter who said, "Louise is right here, and she wants to talk to you."

And she put Louis on the phone, and she said, "Kevin, I love it.

I love the book."

And by this point, she was starting to fade a little bit with her mental faculties, but for so long she was so sharp.

But she said, "How did you learn all that?

How did you know all this?"

I said, "Well, you told me."

And so that was a wonderful sense of closure for the project, and that was in 2021 when we connected.

- That's kind of an added layer.

It's probably one thing to write an unauthorized biography, or to write about a subject who's no longer with us.

But to have somebody involved and kind of checking on you?

That's got to be some pressure that not a lot of biographers have.

- Well, I think that's true, but, you know, I feel a lot of pressure with any really good project because, like the pressure to get it right, I don't wanna screw this up.

And with Louise, I knew that she was among the last, and indeed, she from like before 1940, I don't believe there's anybody alive who was part of The Swing era, and had been around, and could talk about those years.

And so that was what was the incredible thing was being able to talk with someone who was there.

I witness account cause' now we're just relying on, you know, writers like myself and others that have written about this.

And that's why it was important for me to include her voice.

And so I used a lot of her transcripts, you know, from the interviews.

And so I was hoping I wanted her voice to come out in this.

And also, you know, there's probably a lot of you out there that have never heard of Louise Tobin.

And, you know, she was a jazz singer with Benny Goodman in the 1930s, and had a long career through the 20th century, and has so been associated with jazz legends from all over.

I mean Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, the producer John Hammond, and the list is almost endless.

And, but this is her story.

And so she had a story to tell too, and I thought this is important to get her story down.

In fact, that's from Harry Junior, the first thing he said to me in our meeting.

He said, "Everybody to interview my mom and learn about Louis Armstrong."

Tell us about Harry James.

Tell us about Benny Goodman.

And he said, but she has a story to tell and she had a rich life in music.

And so that's what I wanted to grasp was her, her side of it.

- I think that's so important.

And I think, first of all, I wanna say you definitely succeeded.

Her voice is all throughout this book.

So much so that I wanted to actually hear it.

So as I was reading, I would pause and I would go try to find that song or so if I could find that recording, and it's all on YouTube.

So you can find a lot of our music out there if you want to hear it.

And that added a layer of richness to the reading experience, but I agree.

Yes, it's tempting to want to ask about, Was she meant Frank Sinatra?

What was that like?

That's in the book, and it's interesting, but her story, especially as one of the few women singers in this era in this style of music, it's so important that we have her first-hand account of what she did and what she saw.

- Absolutely, one little piece of history that I found fascinating was, you know, Harry, her husband, Harry James, Trumpeter, band leader, he divorced Louise and married Betty Grable.

And so, I mean, if you're young and not know those names.

Look them up, these are big names in American history.

But she it was, she felt very insecure about Harry's womanizing.

And Helen Forest was one of Harry James' early singers with his orchestra.

And Helen Forest had an affair with Harry James.

And she hated Helen Forest.

And she never spoke derogatory of anybody, but you would know that she was not too keen on Helen Forest.

But she thought that Harry had gone after Helen Forrest, you know, had invited her to sing with his orchestra.

And reading Helen Forrest's autobiography, which Louise didn't, I'm sure didn't want to ever do.

Helen Forest would have loved to have said that Harry sought her because she was really into Harry James.

And indeed, she reached out to him and she was the reason why he brought her into the orchestra.

I mean, ultimately it was his decision, but he didn't seek her.

And I think Louise, I mean, she, knowing that was a good thing.

So a lot of times she would tell a story and I would go and look for the documentation to, you know- - Yes, that was going to be my next question.

Of course, you have this amazing rich resource, but memories being what they are.

I'm sure you had to do a lot of fact-checking in secondary sort or first newspaper articles, and tell us about that research process, what was that like?

- Well, that's exactly what I had to do.

And, you know, I'm a guitar player, I'm also a musicologist, and primarily musicologist now, but I started out playing a lot of guitar, and jazz and so forth.

And so it was wonderful for me to dig back into the research on the history of Swing, and big band era music, and the performers and all of that.

And then to have this resource of Louise to be able to talk to her about it, ask her about it.

But yeah, in backing up her story, many times what I would do, I found to really spark the memories, bring a picture, bring a photograph.

Bring a picture of, so she performed, say, at Low State Theater in New York.

And so I found a picture of the interior.

I say, "Do you remember?"

"Oh, yes, (indistinct chatter) and then the whole story would come through.

- That's fascinating.

- And yes, and so I found that really was beneficial.

So along the way, I would bring in pictures and photographs and outside of her collection.

These were things I found that related to places, I knew she had performed and then that would spark a story.

- That's fantastic.

Well, let's dive into her life a little bit.

I want to talk about her origins because they really were very humble and she came from small-town Texas which a lot of people could relate to, tell us about where she started.

- Yeah, she was born in Aubrey, Texas, and her grandfather was one of the founders of the city.

And they came from Alabama originally and large family.

She was like number eight out of 11 children and her mother ultimately had to raise them herself because her father died in 1929 of a car accident.

And there were a lot of people around.

And so she said that, "Her mother pretty much was out of it and not together had really, you know, the death of her husband just sort of devastated her.

And there were all these children.

And so the aunts and uncles and is a very large extended family.

And, but she was really raised by her sisters more than anyone else.

And she was very close, they were very close family and close to her sisters, and her sisters encouraged her to sing.

And she was singing at a very young age, singing at churches, singing on the radio.

And she noticed immediately that she started to get praise and attention and thought well this is pretty nice.

And what she always said was, "I just didn't wanna be stuck in the kitchen washing dishes, you know.

So I wanted to do something and I didn't want it."

She said, "Turned out I washed a lot of dishes, but that's okay."

But she was a performer from very, very early on.

She said, "I fell out of the cradle singing, and she loved to perform, loved to sing.

And you know, having, she raised two sons and on her own, I mean her husband, Harry James divorced her in 1943 and she raised the kids herself, and then went back after they went to college, she went back into performing and then had this whole second life with clarinetist Peanuts Hucko.

And that was her second husband, and he performed with Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller.

And with the Glenn Miller orchestra, when Glenn Miller's plane didn't return, he was in that orchestra at that time, and he had stories about that.

I didn't get to know him.

He died in 2003.

But she had a wonderful life of over 30 years living with him and performing all over the world.

And I tried to document that as well.

And so this book not only is Louisa's story, but I hope we'll spark some interest in research on her second husband, Peanuts Hucko, because he deserves a book as well.

- He's a very interesting character.

- Yes, I wanted more of him too.

- But this is Louise's turn.

- Right.

- So we not gonna that up a mess.

- Did she have training or was she just naturally musical?

- She was naturally musical, and there was one relative that played piano, but she did not have formal music training.

But she learned quickly, and she had a great ear.

And she could sing, you know, on pitch and listened a lot.

She'd heard a lot on the radio.

She said, "We didn't have much money for recordings," so they didn't have a lot of records around, although she did have some.

But it was a lot of radio.

And one of the things that really amazed me, and I talk about it in the chapter in Benny Goodman was the Louise Tobin Blues that she was really her signature song.

And it was a "Blue" song and she made up the lyrics.

And what I did was, I identified these lyrics all look very familiar.

I said, where do these lyrics?

I just made them up.

It's just the Southern blues.

Well, I thought I've heard these lines before.

And so there's this concordance of "Blues" lyrics.

And I went through every line of that "Blue" song that she made up and I found other examples of those.

And so she drew those from just hearing the blues and listening to blues music.

And I think it was really remarkable that because I asked her, I said, then after I clumped out that list, I said, "Who have these have you heard of?"

And there were just a couple.

She heard of Lonnie Johnson and Bessie Smith, and maybe one other.

But there were like 15 or more, I can't remember how many, but a lot of them.

And so she, those were just part of her, you know, world listening.

- Yeah, and so I thought that was really fascinating.

And she worked with another American lyricist, a famous Johnny Mercer who was with the Benny Goodman crew when they did the Camo Caravan radio program broadcasts.

Johnny Mercer and Benny Goodman would introduce the different pieces and Mercer would write songs just as they were in a mission.

He wrote a wonderful lyric, Louise, to the tune "Louise."

♪ Every Louise seemed to listen to the trees ♪ And it's the lyrics are about them being on the road and would you listen, mom and all this is very personal and he wrote that.

And that's actually not part of The Mercer catalog.

I looked up The Mercer songs and it's not listed anywhere.

It's just one of those things he whipped out for her.

- And it's just never, so that's recorded in here and that's part of history now.

- Her career was so long and I think it's because part of it is she started so young.

She was 16 when she first started?

- She was 15.

- 15, yeah, 16 when she got married.

- Mm-hm.

- Yeah.

- So she started touring, I mean, tell us about that.

You had to have a shaper, it was a whole big thing.

- Right, yeah, well, in 1934, her sister entered her into a "CBS Radio Talent Contest," and she won.

And the winner got to do this tour of these different theater circuits, like in Houston, Beaumont, Dallas, and so forth.

And so it was like, well, can she do this?

And they say, well, okay, if you go back to school in the fall, you know, yeah, you can do this.

Well, she was a hit and an agent Bernard Goodman, Goldberg, Bernard Goldberg was a talent scout in Dallas.

And he heard her and thought, here's somebody, you know.

And so he was working with Art Hicks and his orchestra.

That was one of these territory orchestras at the time, 1934.

And Harry James was in that orchestra, among other famous, soon-to-be famous musicians.

Well anyway, they asked her to be part of the orchestra.

And the family said, "The only way would let you do this if you take Dora her sister as a chaperone."

And so they did agreed to that and she began performing like regularly on the radio at these clubs.

Then they went on a tour, they were going to end up in New York and Albany.

And they went to Tulsa, they went to Toledo, Ohio, which is where Art Hicks was from.

Then they went on to Albany, New York.

And I think Buffalo and then Albany.

But they broke up in Albany.

And the Art Hicks found out they just can't make this work.

And Harry had been trying to woo Louise and indeed Louise was smitten with Harry, that was her first date.

And so they were looking to get married.

And nobody would marry them because they were so young.

And so they found a justice of peace in the New York area and got married and they lied about their age.

But Harry was 19 and she was 16 by that point.

And yeah, very young, very young, but a performer, you know.

And she was really, that was just her passion was to perform.

And what she saw with Harry was here's somebody I can have both this relationship with.

He will be life partners and also professional partners.

Well, he didn't see that.

- Yeah, it sounds wonderful, but Harry wasn't thinking so progressively as she was perhaps.

- Exactly, that's exactly right.

And so they worked around the region a while and then he got an opportunity to work with Ben Pollack's orchestra in Chicago.

So they went to Chicago because they were really, you know, trying to make her, his career work rather than hers, and she was kind of working on the way.

"But it was in Chicago when she really became a professional," she said.

And she said that was also the place where Harry, she got the first punch in the gut from Harry.

So the band, Ben Pollack, and his orchestra went out on the road.

And Harry says, "I'll send money back for you and, you know, we'll connect later in all this.

You just wait here and she said, "Okay, fine."

And there were other, you know, wives around and things like that.

So she wasn't alone.

But she would go down into the hotel cafe and have her breakfast.

And so one morning she's down there and the manager come up and said, "You can't eat her anymore."

You know, Harry stops sending money.

And so she stopped well, I guess I won't eat.

You know, she said, you know, "What am I gonna do?"

She said, "I knew I wouldn't going to go home.

I had broken away in terms of mentally, I was out to do this."

And so, she ended up going under the wing of a performer who was a dancer, and part of Mike Todd's or entertainment group.

Mike Todd was Elizabeth Taylor's first husband.

I forgot to actually mention that in here.

But Mike Todd was a big deal.

He did around the world in 80 days and all of that.

And he was Elizabeth Taylor's first husband.

Well, at that time he was just getting started in doing these big shows, these big productions, and he had a show called "Bring on the Dames."

And it featured this of a woman dressed in an asbestos suit that would have all these feathers and dance close to this flame.

And then the flames would start, you know, the feathers would catch on fire and all this.

And Mike Todd said, "I burned up about three girls before I figured out how to do this."

But anyway, Mario Page was one of those dancers, and she befriended Louise and she said, "Come on down; you can audition for this show."

And she said, "It was cold out, I didn't have an overcoat.

It was raining, I looked like, you know, just the most pathetic little thing, and I walked in," and Meryl said to Mike Todd said, "Mike, you better hire this gal because she's not gonna survive this."

So he hires her, she sings and she also was part of a comedic.

She said, "There's where I learned.

I learned that it wasn't just standing up and singing, that I had to present a performance."

- And she said, "I learned how to be a performer in Chicago."

And then she went on a road with them and ended up meeting Harry back in New York.

In New York and then Harry got a call to sing with Benny Goodman, and that all started for Harry.

- And then how did she start to sing with Benny Goodman,?

- Well, so Harry had then left Benny in late '38, '39 I think he was starting his own band.

And they were trying to make money.

They had no money.

He had 400 dollars in his pocket.

He said, "When he started that band, Benny Goodman had lend him some money as well for a percentage of the profits."

But she said, "I went down to Nick's, which was a club in Greenwich Village, and Bobby Hackett was performing there with Eddie Condon, and, you know, while Bill on trumpet and all these performers that are major performers.

And so she quotes Bobby Hackett, and this is the wonderful thing you get when you're doing an interview.

She says, so Bobby says, "Well, if you don't want much money and you like to sing with us, we'd sure your love to have you."

- She said, "It just took him forever to say anything."

And that's what I'm getting chills just saying this because that's what's so wonderful about hearing her story is that you're hearing his voice who's now been gone forever, you know.

And so anyway, so she started singing with Bobby Hackett and John Hammond, the great producer had come in.

And he was working with Benny Goodman, and he brought Charlie Christian for Benny Goodman.

And it was significant in Benny Goodman bringing African American performers into his band.

And so John Hammond hears her singing and says to Benny, "Here's your new singer."

And so Benny hadn't even heard her.

And so as she said, (indistinct chatter) she's gonna have to come to me.

So she flies out to Ohio and do I have time to tell this story because she arrives for what she thinks is the audition?

This is in May 1939.

And so she comes to this to the studio there and there's a drummer, and their couch and his Nick for tour is his first day.

And she says, "Is this where they're doing the rehearsal?"

Well, I don't know, this is where I think it is.

And so in walks Benny Goodman, and she had never met him, even though she was the wife of Harry James.

And so she says, "Are we doing rehearsal?

You don't need rehearse.

You're just gonna sing The Blues."

And so she did a live broadcast on the radio, singing the blues for the first time with the orchestra.

And she made those lyrics up.

And it was about, you know, the name is Louise, my name is Louise, and anyway, so that was her audition.

She said, "I was too young and too, you know, to be nervous.

I just did it."

- I'm glad we got back, because that was my favorite part, that her audition for Benny Goodman was a live performance.

- Yeah.

- So amazing.

Unfortunately, we are running low on time.

So I would encourage people to read the book because there's all about her second life, and her return to music, and all that wonderful stuff is in here.

But in our final minute, what would you hope people take away from Louise and her story?

- Well, you can see, and here we only got to 1939 as well.

So when I did my initial interview with her three and a half hours and we get to 1939, well, it's a full life and she lived to 104.

She just died this past November in 2022, November 26th, and 104 years old, and she performed almost throughout the 20th century.

So she really represents the last surviving voice of a Swing Arrow singer who not only sang during the Swing Arrow, but represented that transition from dance orchestras, you know, string orchestras to dance bands.

And so her voice is very unique.

There's a lot in this book.

One thing when this book arrived, I was opening it up and all excitement.

I thought it'd be a little bigger.

But there's a lot packed in there.

And I cover her full life and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

- I certainly did.

I found her life fascinating and inspiring and relatable too.

There were lots of pieces of her that I connected with and enjoyed.

And again, I would encourage everyone too.

A job well done, so thank you.

- Thank you, Christine.

- Thank you for being here.

That's all the time we have for today.

Thank you so much for joining us.

The title of the book again, was "Texas Jazz Singer," and I will be seeing you again soon.

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