Sophie Tucker & Ted Shapiro Orchestra – Stay Out Of The South (Dixon), Columbia 1928 (UK)
NOTE: Sophie TUCKER – the First Lady of American showbiz in the 1920s was born as Sonia Kalisz in 1887 in a little town of Tulczyn in region of Winnica (Vinnitsa) in the Polish Ukraine (now belonging to the independent state of Ukraine). For centuries, Tulczyn belonged to the Polish aristocratic families Kalinowski and Potocki and the most magnificent of the Potockis' residences was built in Tulczyn by count Franciszek Salezy Potocki in the 18th century. However, after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 that region was captured by the Soviets and was never returned to Poland. The family of Sophie Kalish left for the US when she was 3 months old and while emigrating, her father, who feared being captured to the Russian military service, adopted the name of Abuza. The family settled in Hartford, Connecticut where they ran a kosher diner and rooming house that catered many show business professionals and Sophie, when she was old enough to help in the family business, started singing for the customers she waited on. In 1903 she fell in love and married the local beer cart driver Louis Tuck, they had a son Burt born in 1906. However, the marriage fell apars soon thereafter and Sophie went to New York, to meet the famous composer Harold von Tilzer, she was recommended to by Willie Howard of the Howard Brothers, who had admired her singing. Sophie changed her name to Tucker. Her meeting with von Tilzer gave no fruits, though, and Sophie Tucker started singing in the New York’s cafés and beer gardens to earn her living and sent money to her son and parents. In 1907 she got contracted to sing in the vaudeville performing as a minstrel singer with black face. It is said, what having seen Sophie Tucker on the initial audition, the director would say to his assistant about her: “this one’s so big and ugly the crowd out front will razz her. Better get some cork and black her up”. It took Sophie a couple of years until in Boston, while apearing with white face on stage where she had been announced as “black singer” Sophie Tucker would say to the shocked audience: “look, I am a white girl. I’ll tell you something more: I’m not Southern. I’m a Jewish girl and I learned this Southern accent doing a blackface act for two years”. Singing in the new eploi as a “red hot mama” and singing sogs such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “I’m Living Alone and I Like It,” “I Ain’t Takin’ Orders from No One,” and “No Man is Ever Gonna Worry Me” made her a sweetheart with female and male audiences alike, at venues such as Tony Pastor’s Palace, Reisenweber’s supper club, and soon the vaudeville houses throughout the United States and music halls throughout Europe. In 1910, African-American composer Shelton Brooks wrote her immensely popular signature song “Some of These Days” which opened her way to international fame. She repeated the success with one more signature song of hers, which became in 1925 “My Yddishe Momme” written for her by Jack Yellen.
Sophie Tucker’s career as international star in vaudeville, music halls, and later film, performing in both English and Yiddish spanned over fifty years. She died 1966, in New York City, from a lung ailment and kidney failure at age eighty-two. Three thousand mourners attended her funeral at Emanuel Synagogue Cemetery in Wethersfield, Connecticut.
