I lost several weeks of work on Leaving the Blues because of some minor health issues.  I finally decided to clean out my basement and in the hauling and bending I forgot I was not a teenager any more!  The habits of a life time have to be re-evaluated.  Once with a friend I carried a trunk full of my all of my belongings for ten Manhattan blocks...back in the '70s.  When I finished this current house cleaning I could barely walk up my basement steps.  After some tentative walking and no bending I had X-rays and don't have any serious damage but a course of physical torture...I mean physical therapy...is on order.

 

As I was trying to heal from this mishap I couldn't write but I thought a lot about Alberta Hunter.  When she returned to the stage to begin the second phase of her career she was already in her 80s! At the Cookery, where I saw her perform several time, she was effervescent, sharp and energetic.  As I remember her she seemed to burst from the stage in her huge hoop earrings and elegant gowns.   When she sang "Handy Man" and declared he "shakes my ashes, greases my griddle, churns my butter and he strokes my fiddle..." her double entendre made old and young scream with joy.  See for yourself:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLoPKQZRjOQ

 

Still she was an old woman, someone who never thought she was beautiful.  She'd made up for the poverty of her upbringing by working hard and giving herself the luxuries she never had as a child.  Still she lived in a Jim Crow country where the memory of the Underground Railroad and lynching were not distant.  So it was more than simply overcoming economic deprivation. The Cookery, where her career found it's renaissance, was opened by Barney Josephson, the first white entrepreneur to operate an integrated New York club in the early days; not an accident I think.  He saw artists before he saw color or age. 

 

When Alberta stepped on to the tiny Cookery stage she stepped carefully, as an old woman does.  Looking back I now remember she didn't move around that much once she was in the spotlight...except for her flashing eyes and beautifully manicured hands.

 

Later as her health became more frail the Cookery rigged a small dressing space on the same floor as the restaurant so she wouldn't have to climb the stairs from the lower level.  Still Alberta performed with all the life energy she had.  I recently attended the gathering of OLOC--Old Lesbians Organizing for Change and thought Alberta would have been a headliner there!  The room was full of sparkling, white-haired lesbians, Baby Boomers and older, who were still determined (despite bad eyesight and creaky bones) to make the world more habitable for us.

 

In writing this play I want to see who this fiery old woman might have been.  What propelled her onto that stage when her joints must have been aching?  To be old and Black and female and lesbian in the US is to be the least valuable asset in the eyes of some.  With this exploration of the inner resolve that kept Alberta Hunter climbing onto the stage I think we'll see one of the most valuable gems this culture could ever have. 

 

Join us at the New Conservatory Theatre Center in spring of 2016!  http://www.nctcsf.org/



It begins

When Alberta Hunter was born in 1895 there was little to suggest the amazing musical career that was to follow.  Named for the doctor who pulled up in his buggy to attend her mother, Laura, for the birth in Memphis.  Her father, Charles was a sleeping car porter a not lowly job for African Americans at the time.

Alberta was a frail child who suffered several illnesses, which was not uncommon in the dusty working class and poor Black neighborhoods of many cities across the country.  However her meager beginnings belied the extraordinary will contained within that petite frame.  Alberta was a fascinating combination of often contradictory traits.  She was a 'striver' that is always moving upward, away from poverty and conscious of projecting ladylike behavior.  Yet she always remembered to support those less fortunate than herself and  loved the risqué lyrics of the blues songs of her youth.

She had barely any education yet wrote an admirable number of blues songs including the first big hit recorded by Bessie Smith: "Downhearted Blues."  She scrubbed other people's clothes, sang in dives, performed with Paul Robeson in London and on the Broadway stage.  She was a nurse for 20 years, had female lovers most of her life and sang in clubs and concert halls around the world.

I saw her perform many times at the Cookery, in the West Village of Manhattan toward the end of her life and became fascinated by her sparky energy, her control of her image and her set and the things she did NOT say in the banter with her audience.  My play about the inner life of Alberta Hunter...the things she did not say...will premiere at the New Conservatory Theatre   http://www.nctcsf.org/ in 2016.  Stay tuned here for the inside story of the process of the development of the work which is part of my cycle of plays: WORDS & MUSIC.