Bouncy Blues Singer

Into a flashy Troost Avenue gin mill in Kansas City last week wandered a lonely blonde. Like a lot of others, she had come to spill her troubles to a bosomy Negro blues singer named Julia Lee. She ordered two shots of bourbon for Julia, and a Tom Collins for herself. Julia Lee heard out the story of the blonde's wayward husband, then said with professional assurance: "Everything's going to turn out all right, honey." Then it was time for her act. From her piano, Julia beat out a boogie-woogie rhythm with her strong left hand and sang in a dark purple contralto her own Julia's Blues:

Baby, Baby, what's on your troubled mind,

Baby, Baby, what's on your troubled mind . . .

Until a year ago few people outside of Missouri had ever heard of rolypoly Julia Lee. In Kansas City, where she has shouted blues for more than 30 years, she is as legendary a name to pub crawlers as Artist Thomas Hart Benton. Her black lace gowns, glistening bangs and the artificial flowers in her hair are as familiar to old-style jazz fans as the war memorial in Union Station Plaza. Visiting jazz greats, like Benny Goodman, Red Norvo, Mildred Bailey and Bob Zerke, always seek her out when they hit town.

Julia's regional fame began to spread when jazz expert Dave Dexter Jr., like Julia a native of Kansas City, put two of her songs in a Capitol Records album called History of Jazz. Disc jockeys picked Julia's record out of the album and played it more than the others, so Capitol lured Julia to Hollywood to record twelve more sides. She took her drummer, Baby Lovett, along, and on the way out they wrote a suggestive tune called Gotta Gimme Watcha Got, which sold out immediately. Some jazz critics boldly compared 44-year-old Julia Lee with the greatest blues shouter of them all, the late Bessie Smith.

When Bessie Smith was singing Young Woman's Blues and Empty Bed Blues in Chicago in the 1920s, Julia Lee was singing the same kind of songs with the late Benny Moten's band in Kansas City. Count Basie played the piano. During the depression Julia went to work at $12 a week in Milton's Taproom. In the rowdy days of the Pendergast era, Julia sang ribald ditties like Two Old Maids in a Folding Bed and The Fuller Brush Man. But Kansas City is cleaner now, and so are Julia's lyrics. Now she does songs like Stormy Weather and Night and Day.

Unlike the present crop of blues singers, most of whom indulge in manic-depressive moans, Julia sings her blues with an exuberant bounce which she calls "Kansas City style with a terrific rhythm." On her piano stands a white porcelain "kitty," where fans stuff as much as $60 a night (in addition to her $150 weekly salary). Beside her is a pitcher of water, to wash down the jiggers of bourbon which customers buy her. As a kind of jolly mother confessor to the depressed spirits in the audience, Julia usually ends up a group of songs with an invitation: "Let's sit down and drink it over."

Julia Lee has left Kansas City only a couple of times, once for the recent Hollywood recording date, and once when she sang for three weeks with one-armed Trumpeter Wingy Mannone in Chicago. She got homesick for Kansas City and quit. Says she: "If you're not happy, there's no percentage in the big money."

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