Good Tunes from an Old Violin

By Gerald Clarke

At 87, Alberta Hunter is better than ever

When she made her debut as a singer, she was, in a word--her own word--"lousy." But that was at the beginning of the century. Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, Edward VII was King and she was ten or so. In the years since then, Alberta Hunter's voice has got better, and better and better still. Two weeks ago, when she started a four-month stand at Greenwich Village's jazz club the Cookery, it may have been the best ever. Or, as she puts it in Workin' Man, a song she wrote herself: "There's plenty of good tunes, honey, left in an old violin."

Particularly in this rare and indestructible Stradivarius; there is no one else alive who can sing like Hunter. The second she steps on a stage, it becomes a time machine, and her audience is transported to an era most people know only from scratchy records, the age of the great blues singers: Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and, of course, Alberta Hunter. So small and fragile that she looks as if she would be tossed head over heels by the giant hoop earrings she always wears, Hunter never belts out a song. Instead, she unwraps it, slowly and artfully. Her voice is deeper and more mellow than it was 50 years ago, not rough but grainy and textured. It is wool rather than silk and as warm and comfortable as Grandmother's blanket.

Often, when the lyrics are her own, she changes the words to suit her mood and the audience's. "The minute I hit the floor, I know what kind of audience I have," she says. "If I see they don't know what it's all about, I'll sing things I know they like, like On the Sunny Side of the Street. But if I see they're sophisticated, I'll sing something like / Travel Alone, which Noel Coward wrote for me. I seldom sing it because the home folks wouldn't know what I was talking about."

Fortunately, she started out with sophisticated and very tough audiences. Born in Memphis, where her mother was a maid in a whorehouse and her father a Pullman porter, she always knew she wanted to sing. When Alberta was still a child, she ran away to Chicago, where, she had heard, singers could make $10 a week. She was helped by a friend of the family and, after making a pest of herself, was finally given a chance to sing at Dago Frank's, a saloon where prostitutes and pimps hung out.

She may have been as bad as she says she was, but at Dago Frank's Alberta Hunter learned about singing and everything else. "There was a woman there, Tack Annie, who was one of the world's greatest pickpockets. She looked like a horse with a hat on, the ugliest woman I ever saw in my life! The girls taught me how to look after myself so that I was hip when fellows would come to me and tell me they were going to buy me clothes and make me a prostitute. I could laugh 'em off. I knew more than they did, I betcha!" Inoculated against the vices she witnessed, Hunter never smoked or drank and saved a nickel of every dime she earned. Every week she sent her mother, whom she revered, a portion of her paycheck. Finally, her mother told her to stop; she was tired of going to the bank.

Soon Hunter was singing in better clubs and performing with people like Louis Armstrong and King Oliver. Though she could not read or write music, she was composing. "If one note sounded good and the other sounded good, I'd let the two of them stay together. Then maybe I'd put another one along with them." Out of her search for congenial musical partners came such songs as Downhearted Blues and I've Got a Mind to Ramble.

After a brief marriage to a young veteran of World War I, Hunter, like nearly every other free spirit in the '20s, made her way to Europe. During the years that followed, she performed in clubs all over the Continent, made a fan of the Prince of Wales when she sang at the Dorchester in London and played with Paul Robeson in the London production of Show Boat. "His voice," she says, "sounded like a bell in the distance, it had such resonance." From time to time she returned to the U.S. but refused to work in Harlem, where she thought black singers were cruelly exploited.

During World War II Hunter toured the battlefronts. After Germany was defeated, she sang for General Dwight Eisenhower, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov at a celebration in Frankfurt. But 37 years later, it is not the commanders she remembers. "There was some woman there," she says mischievously. "That cat tried to make out she wasn't interested, but you could see her foot tapping. Women are so jealous, aren't they? Just devils."

Hunter's career resumed after the war but came to a self-imposed halt when her mother died in 1954. Not long after that, all the songs left her heart, and for more than 20 years, she scarcely sang at all. Perhaps only a psychologist could explain why. but it may be that she was too strongly attached to her mother and felt that a part of her had died as well. "I'm the image of my mother," she says, "exactly like her in every way."

In any event, she cut herself off from most of her friends and, lying about her age, began training as a nurse. Nursing became a new career, and she kept at it until 1977, when she was forced to retire by administrators at New York City's Goldwater Memorial Hospital, which is on Roosevelt Island in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. They thought she was 70; in fact, she was 82. Only then, at the urging of friends like Singers Bobby'Short and Jimmy Daniels, did she agree to meet Barney Josephson, owner of the Cookery and a longtime jazz promoter.

The rest of the story is obvious: a record contract with Columbia, packed houses at the Cookery and about 20 additional engagements a year, for as much as $10,000 a night. She does not regret her years as a nurse and still spends much of her time with the patients at Goldwater. Her studio apartment is near by, also on Roosevelt Island, and on days when she is not singing, she will often visit, carrying gifts and good words to the sick. She is content, a woman unacquainted with regret or remorse. "I ain't passin' nothin' by," she sings in I'm Having a Good Time. "I'm knocking myself out, yes, don't try to tame me . . . Tomorrow I may die, that's why I'm havin' a ball today."

--By Gerald Clarke

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