Movie Summary

Marion Harris (1896 – April 23, 1944) was an American popular singer, most successful around 1920. She was the first widely known white singer to sing jazz and blues songs. Born Mary Ellen Harrison, probably in Indiana, she first played vaudeville and movie theatres in Chicago around 1914. She was spotted by dancer Vernon Castle, who enabled her entrance into the New York theatre scene where she debuted in a 1915 Irving Berlin revue titled “Stop! Look! Listen!”. In 1916 she began recording for Victor Records, singing a variety of songs such as “Everybody’s Crazy ‘Bout the Doggone Blues, But I’m Happy”, “After You’ve Gone”, “When I Hear that Jazz Band Play”, her biggest success “I Ain’t Got Nobody”, and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, later recorded by Bessie Smith. In 1920, after the Victor label would not allow her to record WC Handy’s “St. Louis Blues”, she joined Columbia Records where she recorded the song successfully. Sometimes billed as “The Queen of the Blues”, she tended to record blues- or jazz-flavoured tunes throughout her career. Handy wrote of Harris that “she sang blues so well that people hearing her records sometimes thought that the singer was colored”[8]. She herself said: “..you usually do best what comes naturally [and] so I just naturally started singing Southern dialect songs and the modern blues songs..” In 1922 she moved to the Brunswick label. She also continued to appear in Broadway theatres throughout the 1920s. She regularly played the Palace …