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But Freddie Slack, who was Dorsey's piano player, told me that if he ever had his own band, I would have a job. I was sent back to Texas and they hired Helen O'Connell. ''They wrote Dorsey a letter stating that he would be legally responsible for my health, welfare and education. ''Unfortunately, the Texas school board had other plans for me,'' Ms. Morse traveled East with her mother and sang at the New Yorker Hotel. The band leader was impressed enough to offer her a job, and Ms. Morse, who was then 12 years old, auditioned for him, saying she was 19. Morse, who was born in Mansfield, Tex., performed with her father's jazz band and cut her musical teeth singing along with Ella Fitzgerald's ''A-Tisket A-Tasket.'' When Jimmy Dorsey visited the town in 1939, Ms. Both are jazz-blues stylists whose fun-loving humor overrode the conventional pop decorum of the era in a way that directly presaged the playful antics of Presley and fellow rebels.Īs a child, Ms. Both are independent spirits whose fathers were musicians. Lutcher have a lot more in common than having recorded sexy novelties for Capitol in the 40's. Though I had grown up listening to people like Louis Armstrong and Ethel Waters, the singer who probably influenced me the most was Cleo Brown, a Los Angeles singer and pianist who had come from Mississippi and was very hot at the time.'' With Jimmy Dorsey at Age 12 Finally, to entice me they put a glass on the piano with some money in it. They kept asking me to sing, but I kept begging off. ''In 1935, I moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles where I got a job playing the piano in the Dunbar Hotel for two bucks a night. ''I never planned to become a singer,'' Ms. Morse, recorded for Capitol Records, enjoyed a succession of hits, including ''Hurry on Down,'' ''He's a Real Gone Guy'' and ''Fine Brown Frame,'' that titillated audiences with their humorous flaunting of what was then considered racy sexual innuendo. Morse is appearing for the first time in a New York nightclub on a double bill at Michael's Pub with another 1940's jazz artist, Nellie Lutcher, a 71-year-old singer and pianist. The song, like many early Presley hits, was a novelty with a powerful rhythm-and-blues feel.
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''Then when he had finished his number, he ran over to me and grabbed me and gave me a big hug and said, 'Baby, you taught me how to sing!' ''Īt the time Ella Mae Morse met Presley, she was already a semi-legend who 14 years earlier had scored her first success singing ''Cow Cow Boogie'' with Freddie Slack's Orchestra. ''From where I was sitting, all I could see was his silhouette,'' Ms. ONE memorable night 30 years ago, Ella Mae Morse was waiting backstage at ''The Ed Sullivan Show'' to receive a gold record for her recording of ''Money Honey.'' Out front, Elvis Presley, who was also to be awarded a gold record for his version of ''Money Honey,'' growled and swiveled to a sea of shrieking adulation.