Marion Harris (1896 — 1944) was an American popular singer, most successful around 1920. She was the first widely known white singer to sing jazz and blues songs. She sang in vaudeville and Broadway shows. She regularly played the Palace Theatre, appeared in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic, and toured the country with vaudeville shows. In 1929 Marion Harris plays Ramon Novarro's cousin in "Devil-May-Care" her first and only full-length motion picture, which turned out to be a flop. She then temporarily withdrew from performance, because of an undisclosed illness. Between 1931 and 1933, when she performed on such NBC radio shows as The Ipana Troubadors and Rudy Vallee's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour, she was billed by NBC as "The Little Girl with the Big Voice." In early 1931 she performed in London, returning for long engagements at the Café de Paris. In London she appeared in the musical Ever Green and broadcast on BBC radio During World War II, Miss Harris was living in London with her theatrical agent husband Leonard Urry. Marion Harris died in 1944 in a hotel room in New York. She had gone to sleep with a lit cigarette that ignited her bed. This lovely record was made in 1929.
