rocknroll_n_blues_queens | Black History Month: Hadda Brooks 1916-2002, pianist & composer & actress (Reply)

We've got another queen here, darlings, and this time she's the queen of the boogie-woogie. Hadda Brookes was another genre crossing lady, did everything from boogie-woogie to jazz to blues

Hadda Brooks - That's My Desire

Hadda Brooks - Blues In B-Flat

Wiki sez:

In her youth she formally studied classical music with an Italian piano instructor, Florence Bruni, with whom she trained for twenty years. She attended the University of Chicago, and later, returned to Los Angeles. She came to love the subtle comedy of black theater and vaudeville entertainer and singer Bert Williams. Brooks began playing piano professionally in the early 1940s at a tap-dance studio owned by Hollywood choreographer and dancer Willie Covan. For ten dollars a week, she played the popular tunes of the day while Covan worked with such stars as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Shirley Temple. Brooks was married briefly during this period to aHarlem Globetrotter named Earl "Shug" Morrison in 1941. She toured with the team when they traveled. Morrison developed pulmonary pneumonia, however, and died about a year after they were married. It was Brooks' only marriage.
Brooks actually preferred ballads to boogie-woogie, but worked up her style by listening to Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis records. Her first recording, the pounding "Swingin' the Boogie," for Jules Bihari's Modern Records, was a sizable regional hit in 1945, and another R&B Top Ten with "Out of the Blue," her most famous song.^[5] It was Jules Bihari who gave her the recording name Hadda Brooks.^[6] Clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman recommended Brooks to a film director friend of his who placed her in the film Out of the Blue in 1947.^[7] Encouraged by orchestra leader Charlie Barnet, Brooks practiced singing "You Won't Let Me Go," and the song became her first vocal recording in 1947. She usually played the small part of a lounge piano player in films, and often sang the title song. "Out of the Blue" became a top hit for Brooks, "Boogie Woogie Blues" followed in 1948, and she appeared in In a Lonely Place (1950) starring Humphrey Bogart,^[8] and in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) with Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas.^[9] Brooks became the first African-American woman to host her own television show in 1957. The Hadda Brooks Show,^[10] a combination talk and musical entertainment show, aired on Los Angeles' KCOP-TV. The show opened with Brooks seated behind a grand piano, cigarette smoke curling about her, and featured "That's My Desire" as her theme song. She appeared in 26 half-hour episodes of the show, which were broadcast live in Los Angeles and repeated on KGO in San Francisco.MORE