Singing for the Devil

Out of a dressing room just big enough to hold her, a short, stout and bespectacled Negro woman stepped onto the two-by-four stage. The prim expression on her flat face was that of a Sunday school teacher lost in a gin mill and primed to bawl out the customers. Seconds later, her ample hips bouncing, her abdomen lewdly rolling, she was shouting the blues at the top of her voice. Last week, after a 17-year absence, Bertha ("Chippie") Hill was back at her old trade. To Manhattan's smoke-filled Village Vanguard, deep in a Greenwich Village cellar, her name had drawn a record opening-night crowd which egged Chippie on with wild applause after each number and plied her with shots of straight gin after the show.

In those 17 years, Chippie had changed some, but not her voice. It was still brash and undisciplined, often nasally unmusical and handicapped by careless phrasing. But at her unpredictable best, Chippie handled the blues with the loving and instinctive expertness of her collectors' item records of the middle '20s, when she worked with Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Earl ("Father") Hines. She had quit singing in 1930 to bring up her four kids (later there were three more). When Jazz Pedant Rudi Blesh found her three months ago she was scraping trays in a Chicago cafeteria.

Last week, fingers snapping, eyes flashing behind her glasses, Chippie shouted through the applause: "What you wanna hear now?" From the bar at the rear a man's deep voice rose clearly above the noise: "Just sing, Chippie, just sing." So Chippie just sang: Steady Roll, Trouble in Mind, Baby Won't You Please Come Home.

Chippie Hill is one of the primitives of jazz, and her performance is an earthy blending of sex and syncopation (it would take an undauntable jazzophile to tell where one began and the other ended). There isn't much Chippie won't sing or say to keep the show boiling--but she won't sing a hymn in a nightclub. "Now that's wrong. You can't play with God in a nightclub; if you do He'll put an affliction on you." Neither will she sing in church. "As long as I work for the Devil, I better continue with him. You got to sing for the Devil or go to Church and not talk back. When I get myself a man who will pull up a table to me and set like folks, I'll give up singing for the Devil, but until then I won't fool around with God."

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