Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular Music

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JEFFRIES, Herb

(b Umberto Allesandro Valentino, 24 September 1911, Detroit MI; d 25 May 2014, Los Angeles CA) Singer and actor. He told Patricia Willard that he was born in 1913, but he told the Village Voice it was 1911, and he celebrated his 90th birthday in 2001. He didn’t know his real name until he needed to get a passport. He was Irish-Italian, but one-eighth African, as his great-grandfather had married an Ethiopian. A very handsome man, his color was so light that he effectively chose to be black. He began singing as a teen in Detroit; Louis Armstrong recommended him to Erskine Tate at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago, where he was immediately hired away by Earl Hines, who required him to black up when the band toured the South.

As Herbert Jeffrey he starred in several musical Western movies in the late 1930s; he had been cowboy crazy as a boy, and knew that there had been plenty of black cowboys in the old West: he gave African-American kids a glimpse of historical truth. He had seen that African-Americans had their own movie theatres and thought they should have their own movies as well; he raised the money for the first film: Harlem On The Prairie was released in 1937 (using Max Factor makeup to darken his skin: 'They put Egyptian 37 on me,' he said years later). Further films for the African-American market were Two-Gun Man From Harlem and Rhythm Rodeo '38, The Bronze Buckaroo and Harlem Rides The Range '39.

Duke Ellington heard him sing at the Apollo Theatre, subsequently invited him onstage at a gig in Detroit, and called him in 1940 to record 'Flamingo', unusual in Ellington's output because it wasn't his song, but written by Ted Grouya and Edmund Anderson, arranged by Billy Stayhorn. Released in June 1941, it was a hit a year before the Billboard black charts began, and made Jeffries famous. (The song was revived by Earl Bostic in 1951 and by Herb Alpert in 1966.) Jeffries had a part in Ellington' show Jump For Joy in 1941, singing the title song and 'Brown-Skin Gal (In The Calico Gown)'; allegedly, the show's financial backer, John Garfield, wanted him to black up, but Ellington wouldn't allow it.

After military service in WWII Jeffries ran a jazz supper club in France, where his guests included Orson Welles and Egypt’s King Farouk. He resumed acting, appearing in Disc Jockey in 1951 with Sarah Vaughan and Tommy Dorsey, and as Calypso Joe in 1957 with Angie Dickinson; and in 1967 he directed his wife, burlesque star Tempest Storm, in the cult classic Mundo Depravados. His many TV roles culminated with The Cherokee Kid in 1996.
 He was still singing well in old age, and made an album of cowboy songs The Bronze Buckaroo (Rides Again), and The Duke And I. In 2003 he was working on an autobiography to be called Skin Deep.