Cora "Lovie" Austin (September 19, 1887 – July 8, 1972) was one of the premier bandleaders in the hot jazz scene in Chicago in the 1920’s. She was the house pianist at Paramount records, where she accompanied the best women singers, as well as leading her own sessions with formidable sidemen of the era. She and Lil Hardin Armstrong are often ranked as two of the best female jazz blues piano players of the period.
She was born Cora Calhoun in Chattanooga, Tennessee and grew up with eight brothers and sisters. Her early career was in vaudeville where she played piano and performed in variety acts. She was married in 1908 for a short time to a movie house operator in Detroit and then later married a vaudeville performer, Phillip Austin in 1910. She studied music theory at Roger Williams University in Nashville, and Knoxville College in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was uncommon for African American women and jazz musicians alike during the time. Austin could have chosen a respectable career as a music teacher. But, like her contemporary Lil Hardin Armstrong, also a classically trained pianist, Austin opted for the more lucrative world of live entertainment, playing piano and performing in variety acts on the thriving black vaudeville circuit.
Tiring of the relentless touring and poor conditions, Austin had settled in Chicago in 1923, a magnet for entertainers and musicians. She lived and worked there for the rest of her life. She led her own band, the Blues Serenaders, which usually included trumpeters Tommy Ladnier, Bob Shoffner, Natty Dominique, or Shirley Clay on cornet, Kid Ory or Albert Wynn on trombone, and Jimmy O'Bryant or Johnny Dodds on clarinet, along with banjo and occasional drums. The Blues Serenaders developed their own unique sound within the jazz genre. Together they recorded 16 sides for Paramount between 1924 and 1926.
From the 1920s into the late 1940s, Austin recorded with many of the great blues singers, including Chippie Hill, Ida Cox, Edmonia Henderson, Alberta Hunter, and Ma Rainey. Austin's skills as songwriter can be heard in the classic "Down Hearted Blues", a tune she co-wrote with Alberta Hunter. Singer Bessie Smith turned the song into a hit in 1923. Austin worked with many other top jazz musicians of the 1920s, including Louis Armstrong, with whom she worked on the song "Heebie Jeebies". Austin was often seen racing around town in her Stutz Bearcat with leopard skin upholstery, dressed to the teeth.
When the classic blues craze began to wane in the early 1930s, Austin settled into the position of musical director for the Monogram Theater, at 3453 South State Street in Chicago where all the Theatre Owners’ Booking Association (TOBA) acts played. She worked there for 20 years. During wartime, many jazz musicians had to find other forms of work to support themselves and Austin worked in a war plant during World War II. In a 1950 profile of Lovie published in DownBeat, she lamented that after the death of Paramount’s owner her royalty checks stopped coming, and by 1954, a piece in Hue Magazine titled “What Happened To Lovie Austin?” revealed that after twenty years at the Monogram, she was working as a pianist at Jimmy Payne’s Dancing School where she performed and recorded occasionally.
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| Lovie Austin & Alberta Hunter |
In 1961 jazz critic Chris Albertson brought Hunter and Austin back into the studio to record “Alberta Hunter with Lovie Austin and her Blues Serenaders”, in which the two performed “Down Hearted Blues” together for the first time since 1922. This album would be Austin’s last recording although she did continue to perform throughout the 1960s, finally retiring in the early 1970s. Austin, unfortunately, would not have a long retirement, for she passed away at the age of 84 years, in Chicago on July 10, 1972, surrounded by scores and staves, of accomplished songs and others barely sketched, of records, books, letters, portraits of loved ones and fragments of the past immortalized on photographs, of immeasurable memorabilia, and of her eternal and precious piano. She was buried in Mount Glenwood Memory Gardens South, Glenwood, Cook County, Illinois.
In later life, Hunter remembered Austin as “a wonderful woman. She was kindhearted. She tried to help everybody she could.” Mary Lou Williams, who became one of the most influential female jazz musicians and composers of the twentieth century, never forgot her debt to Austin. “She was a fabulous woman and a fabulous musician too,” Williams was quoted as saying in the liner notes for a Stash Records retrospective, reproduced on the Red Hot Jazz website. “I don’t believe there’s a woman around now who could compete with her. She was a greater talent than many of the men.”
(Edited from encyclopedia.com., All About Jazz, Wikipedia, Historia Hoy & Find a Grave) (Please note I have noticed many photos on the web of Lovie Austin which are actually Alberta Hunter, so beware!)