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The Rockin' Chair Lady (1931-1950)

Mildred Bailey

Verve

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1. Willow Tree
2. Honeysuckle Rose
3. Squeeze Me
4. Downhearted Blues
5. Blues in My Heart
6. You Call It Madness (But I Call It Love)
7. When It's Sleepy Time Down South
8. Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (And Dream Your Troubles Away)
9. When That Man Is Dead and Gone
10. Jenny
11. Georgia on My Mind
12. Rockin' Chair
13. Sometimes I'm Happy
14. Everything Depends on You
15. Lover, Come Back to Me
16. All Too Soon
17. It's So Peaceful in the Country
18. More Than You Know
19. Cry Cry Cry
20. Blue Prelude

Average customer rating:

Mildred Rocks!

This is an excellent CD of great music. Sure, her voice is squeaky, but the she knows how to sing, and the music is great! Got it at Amazon.

Oh the fun and joy and Jazz of the Great Mildred Bailey

Mildred Bailey was not just the first real Jazz band singer. She was one of the earliest real jazz singers and she continued to have a jazz based strain to her singing throughout her career unlike some singers with her success who might have gone more pop. She was fun. She was fun. She was fun. She jived, she joked, she played. You are going to smile when you hear Mildred and know she is really serious when she is serious. She could bring out the jazz in the most wooden of accompaniest, but usually she had great musicians, white, black or otherwise playing behind her, because Mildred is fun.

In an age before television, Bailey continued to have fans white and Black who did not know she was white. This remains true even recently when I have loaned tapes of Mildred to other African Americans without any liner notes or anything and had them ask why they had never heard of this great Black singer.

However, I do find it distressing that Mildred Bailey seems to be so forgotten. She was the first prominent female band singer in Jazz. She was and is fun to listen to and a great voice. Mildred was actually able to swing and swing hard even with Paul Whiteman. She produced masterpieces using some of the same small groups as Billie Holday for HER Columbia recordings, although Bailey semed to prefer Herschal Evans to Lester Young. Bailey was also pretty out front for the time as a white female singer performing with an all black combo--"Mildred Baily and Her Oxford Browns." Mildred was simply magnificent in the small combos her husband Red Novro organized, She had a sense of humor about her performances and a bit of salaciousness that you won't find in Billie's recordings.

I don't think it was just out of sentimentality, but in tribute to her artistry, that Sinatra and Bing Crosby (who owed his career to Bailey's bringing him in contact with Whiteman)spent thousands of dollars helping her out in the last years of her life when health problems and the end of her career led her to very hard times.

Mildred was a great singer, a great jazz pioneer, and a lot of fun. How does anyone get along without the joy her music has brought to my life. There have been times when my life was worse than it is now when I was depressed and just thinking about one of Mildred's tracks on this CD started to turn my life around!

A Revelation: She Knows

Prior to this collection, Mildred Bailey was a shadowy musical presence from the past for me--a skilled performer with an overly sweet voice devoted to lightweight interpretations of standards and blues. The first tune, "Willow Tree," did little to challenge my assumption, the radiant, high-pitched timbre almost belying the world-weary content of the song's lyrics. But with each new song in this 20-track anthology, the emotion and pathos become increasingly unmistakable in the singer's developing story. "Wrap Your Troubles" and "Sometimes I'm Happy," for example, contain sub-texts of unrest and despair, not so much depressing as provocative in their evocation of tragic resonances beneath the song's surface. Some present-day listeners may find this music dated, but to my ears these are timeless performances, expressing a sentiment that forces reconsideration of the meaning of the word "melodrama." Each of these little lyrics is a timeless musical drama as sung by M.B. Moreover, these performances are testimony to a lady who knows and truly can sing the blues.

There's also an impressive, thoughtful demonstration of wordless vocalese ("scat," if you will). Listen to her "clarinet" solo on "Blues in My Heart" and her Satchmo "trumpet" solo on "Sleepy Time." They're not the least bit contrived or extraneous but as valid and moving as a trumpet solo by Pops himself.

The only slight (very) downsides are some orchestral interludes that are not only dated but bland.

A fine compilation...

One of the only domesticly available Bailey CD's, showcases her style through the yaers from the late 20's to the ealry 50's. All of her recordings are well worth hearing and owning.