Lizzie's Return

She looked the soul of matronly dignity. One night last week, wearing a black-lace-over-taffeta dress, a rope of artificial pearls and a corsage of roses pinned demurely over her ample midriff she stepped quietly in front of Bob Scobey's Dixieland combo in Oakland's Showboat Cafe. When she let fly with Ain't Gonna Give You None of My Jelly Roll, she rocked the Showboat. She clapped her hands, snapped her fingers shuffled her feet, flapped her elbows. The singer was New Orleans' Lizzie Miles, 60 one of the last of a great generation of Negro blues shouters.

The lacerated joys and sunny sorrows of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Chippie Hill survive only in the grooves of phono graph records, but their way with a song has been a lesson to every singer right down to Rosemary Clooney and Eartha Kitt. Lizzie is surviving handsomely, in person. Her voice has a brazen ring and a driving spirit; if she sings a bit flat here and there, she is always steady on the beat. Above all, she brings an au hentic echo of a past jazz age that the youngsters in her audience never knew and the oldtimers tearfully remember.

Now and then she may sit down with a blues-loving customer and talk; her stories pack almost as much wallop as her songs. When she was six or seven in New Orleans, Lizzie recalls, she started to sing with the band jointly run by Kid Ory and King Oliver -- songs with words like Don't do that dance, I tell you, Sadie That's no dance for a lady.

She was married at 16, but left her husband a year later and then joined the Cole Bros. Circus, singing with the sideshow band. "I saw the whole country," she says. "I saw America like the millionaires didn't see it!" The Gangsters Were Quiet. In the 1918 flu epidemic, she was seriously ill.

"I promised the Blessed Lady that if God made me better, I'd never get on a stage again. I got better all right. And one night, a boy friend come around and took me to a club in Bucktown. When we got there, he told the bandleader, ooooh, could I sing. Well, it wasn't any stage, so I got up and sang Dardanella, and they paid me $25 a week." For years after that, in New York and Chicago, Lizzie was something of a favorite. Those were heady days, with the big gamblers at the ringside. ("I remember Little Augie, he always wanted to hear Prisoner's Song -- you know, 'If I had the wings of an angel . . .' Most of those gangsters were the nicest, quietest people.") In the Depression years, the blues were too real for comfort : Lizzie thought she was through. She worked as a housemaid, later as a barmaid. Even in World War II, she could not find a singing job. "Showfolks, gamblers and sportin' people have no loyalty.

I was too fat and too old." Finally, four years ago, she persuaded a New Orleans disk jockey called Poppa Stoppa to put her on his program. Soon after that, she had singing jobs again, swept along by the huge current jazz boom. "I dug up my old antique gowns -- crepe and satin --and my long beads and fancy combs and shoes with rhinestones on the heels." The Music Was Different. Today, billed as vocalist with the Scobey combo, Lizzie is playing some of the country's better-known jazz spots (including, last month, Chicago's Blue Note). Everywhere, she becomes the favorite as soon as she opens her generous mouth.

But Lizzie's new success has not made her forget the beauties of the good old days. "I remember here come Jelly Roll Morton passing our house, on the way to play in Storyville," she muses. "I recollect Ory and Oliver. It used to be it was so hot they'd drop one suspender, open their shirts and their pants so's they'd be comfortable, and would they play! The music then was different. Everybody played close. They listened to each other. They played a strong melody and pretty, pretty chords. Nowadays, they play before the beat, after the beat, everything but on the beat." Not only the music has changed. "New Orleans isn't the same any more either.

It's gettin' so fancy with tourists and all.

I hope I die before they make a Northern city out of New Orleans."

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