As I submitted earlier this year to the Nostalgia Digest Facebook Group, a (moderated!) online forum companion to the Chicago Saturday afternoon weekly radio show (1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Central Time), Those Were the Days, hosted by Steve Darnall with Ken Alexander (and founded in 1970 by Chuck Schaden), and broadcast on public radio station, WDCB, streaming live over WDCB.org, and which is available via TuneIn and so can be played on the Amazon Echo–“Alexa, play WDCB!”
Steve! I hadn’t caught the name of the first singer on the Stoopnagle & Budd show, but I became interested after hearing her, and especially when it was said she was from Chicago. It wasn’t in your description of the episode — but to be fair, it isn’t on *anyone’s* description of the episode!! All I could find online was another copy of the show, so I listened to it and that’s how I found out the singer–and pianist, that was her on those keys!–was Cleo Brown. Research on her turned up she was the first woman instrumentalist to be granted the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship. That song she sang, “He’s So Good to Me” was likely her original–despite several songs by that title. But she had recorded the song in January 1935 [ https://buff.ly/2GDP7PW ] and so sang it on the S&B ep in March. According to her Wikipedia entry [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleo_Brown ], it was in 1935 that Brown replaced Fats Waller as pianist on New York radio station WABC. She later toured and recorded, but in the 1950s she was baptized and became a nurse, as she put it when she appeared decades later, in 1985, on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz. Having dropped off the radar as she had, some thought she had died! But no, she had been playing, just merging her talents into gospel music.
That paragraph above is the edited and condensed version of my fighting to track down the name of the Black woman singing that song on the Stoopnagle & Budd radio show! I can only hope that when you hear her, you’ll have the same reaction: Who was that??
There are some things that worked in my favor. If you’re trying to look up information on a radio show, believe me, you can’t possibly confuse with anyone else a comedy pair by the name of Stoopnagle & Budd! The Dinosaur Gardens Stoopnagle & Budd page provided a link to the same March 15, 1935 radio show being played on WDCB. I finally got to hear the singer’s name at minute 8:32 of the 29:02 program: Cleo Brown! The song starts out pretty standard for the Big Band era — and then takes a hard left into some PRIME boogie-woogie! I wanted to know who sang the song and I also wanted to know who was accompanying her on the piano — wow!
The name “Cleo Brown” sounded vaguely familiar — maybe I heard the name before; maybe it’s that the nomenclature of the name was in familiar Black American cultural territory — but I had the idea to ask the Amazon Echo, since I’d turned it off from playing WDCB in order to find the singer. I don’t know what I had expected to hear — but I was very surprised by what I heard, which was the first couple of lines of the Cleo Brown Wikipedia entry:
“Alexa! Who’s Cleo Brown?” I asked.
The Amazon Echo answered, “Cleopatra Brown, known as Cleo Brown, C. Patra Brown or Cleo Patra Brown, was an American blues and jazz vocalist and pianist. She was the first woman instrumentalist to receive the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship.”
I gasped! SAY WHAT?! The first woman instrumentalist JAZZ MASTER??
So not only was that her singing, that was her playing!?
I immediately set about finding more information about this amazing talent, that I’d completely missed up to that day! And I found out so much! Once you have a name, you can reap the bounty.
Well, eventually . . .
A Google search on “Cleo Brown” found that she has her very own Cleo Brown Google Box, as well as the following pages:
Cleo Brown on Piano Jazz at NPR
Cleo Brown – Artist Biography by Eugene Chadbourne at AllMusic.com
Cleo Brown on Internet Broadway Database and Cleo Brown at Playbill
Cleo Brown Discography at discogs.com
Cleo Brown at the Internet Archive
And this is where the story became even more interesting. Cleo Brown recorded and released a good number of records, with a mixture of others’ songs as well as her own original compositions, and had several albums, plus has had songs appear on various compilations — as her Spotify profile can attest (Yes, I did file a complaint with Spotify on the record company that put out an album of Cleo Brown’s songs USING A COVER PHOTO OF IDA B. WELLS?! Futile, as it’s not Spotify’s illustration to change, but some things you just can’t let slide.). But on absolutely NONE of these albums did I ever find the song she sang on Stoopnagle & Budd, “He’s So Good to Me.” After listening to a few other songs with the same title to make sure, I realized that it must have been an original song of hers. And I did find that she recorded it in January 1935, as noted above. However, I could find no trace of that recording. Either it was damaged or lost, or she didn’t like it. Suffice it to say, that the only available performance of Cleo Brown singing and playing “He’s So Good to Me” IS that Stoopnagle & Budd radio show!
Spotify did helpfully reveal that the songs of Cleo Brown get over 5,000 plays a month. OK, not Mariah Carey numbers, but impressive nonetheless — as they are all from overseas! December 2019 lists that the top five locations of her listeners are Vienna, Berlin, Zurich, London, and Prague. Cleo Brown was born in Meridian, Mississippi, ya’ll! True, it’s not unusual for Black 20th Century jazz artists to be better appreciated overseas. But I did get a look at something that may have helped — and continues to help — pump up her popularity over there.
Let’s go back to the Cleo Brown Google Box. There are biographical notes on Cleo Brown in various books and magazines, as a Google Books search using “Cleo Brown” piano will attest. But a few had mentioned that at no time was Cleo Brown ever filmed performing, a great loss to us all — videos of her music on YouTube use photos. So why did the Google Box list a movie? What was “Cleo’s Boogie”??
There are certain things you expect to find in looking up a music artist. An animated short from Belgium, from 2010, depicting said musical artist as a black cat singing the artist’s 1949 Capitol Records release, namely ,”Cleo’s Boogie”, that comes off more like a brand new rap song, awash in color blasts of rhythmic surrealism, is NOT one of them–! Read more about “Cleo’s Boogie (2010)”. Watch the six-minute short below.
Curiouser and curiouser! Finally, though, I did find out that even if I was clueless about Cleo Brown, she is very visibly honored by her hometown, the aforementioned Meridian, Mississippi. The Meridian Blues and Jazz Marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail includes a photo of Cleo Brown performing at the piano, alongside her hit record from 1935 on the Decca record label, “I’ll Take the South”, as the first in a collage of photos of other music legends from the city. See the news report about its unveiling, “Marker celebrates Meridian’s contribution to blues, jazz music,” written by Michael Neary for The Meridian Star, which was published November 2, 2017:
Meridian Mayor Percy Bland and Jamell Richardson were joined by other dignitaries during the unveiling of the Meridian Blues & Jazz marker on Fifth Street and 25th Avenue Thursday. Richardson, known as “The Gulf Coast Blues Boy” is one of more than 30 artists recognized on the marker, the 198th sign to be placed on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
The Meridian Blues & Jazz marker, which was unveiled at the corner of Fifth Street and 25th Avenue Thursday, recognizes more than 30 artists for their contributions to the state’s musical heritage.
One last note. After finding most of this, I did search again and did find descriptions of that Stoopnagle & Budd radio show that did list Cleo Brown’s name as a performer on the show, plain as day. But if I’d found those in the first place, would I have embarked on this trip through the Internets and discovered this whole life and career and legacy of hers–? I’m honestly not sure.
