Marion Harris was born in 1896 in Indiana. At the time she recorded her early jazz song "When I Hear that Jass Band Play" in 1917, it was probably the first jazz music recorded by a female artist. With her short bobbed hair and jazz recordings, she was the typical flapper girl of the 1920s. Harris started recording with the Victor Talking Machine Co. in 1916 but jumped to Columbia in 1920 when Victor repeatedly refused to let her record W C Handy's St Louis Blues which she made at Columbia in 1920.
Handy said of Marion, "Miss Harris has used our numbers in vaudeville for a long time and she sang blues so well that people thought the singer was colored. Throughout her career, Harris favored jazz and blues of the black composers.
She appeared in the Zeigfeld follies in the early 20s and on Broadway in the latter 20s. In'29 she made her motion picture debut in Devil May care with Raymond Navarro, and early sound movie. The early 30s found her performing in London and in '35 she moved there. In the late 30s, she retired from showbiz and married theatrical agent Leonard Urry. When her London home was firebombed by the Nazis during WWII, her husband sent her to New York for safety. Ironically, she died in a fire in New York in 1944 after falling asleep with a lit cigarette.
Thanks to Jazzage 20s for some of the material in this vid.
Beale Street, Memphis, Tennessee. Recorded acoustically March 1921 in New York for Columbia Records.