Marion Harris (April 4, 1896? – April 23, 1944) became famous as a white vaudeville singer and recording artist who was influenced by contemporary black jazz which helped to usher in the Jazz Age across America. For several decades beginning around 1915 and continuing well into the 1920s she was a seminal force in American popular music with over 130 recordings to her credit.
Her birth year and place are unknown, variously reported as Kentucky or Indiana, and that her family name was Harrison and her name may have been Mary Ellen. Also mysterious is a report that she ran away from a convent at age 14 to pursue a singing career as an Illustrated Singer. This was a vogue ca. 1900 to have singers in early vaudeville perform a story song to the visual accompaniment of colour lantern slides which could be purchased from various mail-order companies around the country. The slides were changed as the performer sang different parts of the story song.
She was seen and recommended by the noted society dancer Vernon Castle, who together with his wife Irene, was among the great elegant dancers of their era and who were among the first to innovate traditional coupled ballroom dancing with new and unusual footwork such as the Castle Walk. Vernon died in an airplane crash while instructing new recruits during World War I. He recommended Marion to record producers at Victor.
She began to appear at this time, 1915, in the Charles Dillingham and Irving Berlin produced show Stop, Look and Listen, along with French star Gaby Deslys. She was also a regular visitor to Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic where her powerful voice à la Blossom Seeley, a huge star of the time, thrilled listeners.
Her popular songs for Victor Records 1916 through 1919 made her a national star and a foremost singer of the new jazz idiom, heavily influenced by black music and black composers, especially Henry Creamer and J. Turner Layton. During the teens and twenties they produced hit after hit for black and white artists. They gave her one of her biggest hits, After You’ve Gone, which had been introduced by Sophie Tucker. Another very sad black tune, although the composers of it are still disputed, was introduced by black comedian Bert Williams and became an enormous hit for Marion. Her recording in 1919 of A Good Man is Hard to Find, was essentially hard black jazz and was later a mainstay song for Bessie Smith ca. 1927.
There were battles over what Victor wanted her to record and in 1920 she joined many other celebrities at Columbia Records, among them Al Jolson and Bert Williams. With Columbia Harris’ work got more blues-infiltrated and more black-influenced.
She was often mistaken for a black blues singer by those who only heard her records and never saw her in a show. And she had a great number of hits, some having become jazz and pop standards such as There'll Be Some Changes Made. W.C. Handy wrote, "She sang blues so well that people hearing her records sometimes thought that the singer was coloured." Harris commented, "You usually do best what comes naturally, so I just naturally started singing Southern dialect songs and the modern blues songs."
In 1921 she married an actor, Robert Williams, but it was a stormy union that was over within a year. There was a little girl from the union, who later sang and billed herself as Marion Harris Jr. By the mid twenties after recording with Brunswick for a time she married the nephew of millionaire Howard Hughes and took a hiatus from performing to have, it is believed, two more children…and a second divorce.
In 1927 she returned in a highly successful show called A Night in Spain. The show ran for an outstanding 174 performances. She went back to recording now, with a style more pop than black, and she became a major influence on the next generation which sounded more and more like her: Ruth Etting and Annette Hanshaw.
After embarking on a film career singing in the 1929 early talkie and musical film Devil May Care with former silent film idol Ramon Novarro, she became seriously ill and briefly retired but then returned as a popular radio vocalist on major shows of the early 1930s. She became a notable star in England too and did extensive touring and recording there to great acclaim, marrying English theatrical agent Leonard Urry.
After their home was destroyed in a German rocket attack, she became terrified and unsettled throughout World War II, eventually coming back to America for treatment of a neurological disorder. Medically discharged, although still unstable, she stayed at the Hotel Le Marquis, 12 East Thirty-First Street in New York, where on April 23, 1944 she fell asleep with a lit cigarette while sleeping in a hotel bed and was burned to death. She had just turned 48.
Marion Harris is yet another unsung, forgotten star of the stage and popular songstress of the 1920’s. Listeners to her recordings today will find her voice and phrasing unparalleled by other stars of the era.
(Edited mainly from an article by David Soren @ The American Vaudeville Museum & UA collection)