Artifacts and relics and remembrances!
A very prescient autograph collector captured Benny, Gene, Helen, and Frank Froeba (at the “piana”) in mid-1935.
For a newspaper story, Miss Lee Wiley in 1933, billed as “Indian radio singer.”
The other side of the news story: “Just as I finally learned how to knit.”
An Israeli film poster!
From Facebook, thanks to Stephen Hester: someone made a pilgrimage! Cutty Cutshall, Freddie Ohms, Walter Page, Wild Bill Davison, Edmond Hall, and the Master himself. “Good luck” for sure. And “Best regards.”
May your happiness increase!
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Wally Page?
Michael,
I LOVE the image of Lee Wiley at the spinning wheel with that sweet grandmother guiding her! This had to be some PR person’s idea, a very incongruous one indeed. I daresay that the divine Ms. W. spent very little time spinning yarn. But she was very busy working in radio and on records with some of the best musicians of the 1930s, including Victor Young and Bunny Berigan, two of her many paramours. Her singing was always completely individual, and very sensuous.
If anyone ever writes the complete story of Lee Wiley, it would be a very hot biography–people would burn their fingers turning the pages!
Lee Wiley and Mildred Bailey, another great singer from the 1930s whose biography is begging to be written, both shared native American heritage, something I find very interesting. I am sure that that heritage affected their approach to singing, which was completely compatible with jazz.
Thanks again for unearthing a gem.
Michael P. Zirpolo
Author
“Mr. Trumpet…the Trials, Tribulations and
Triumph of Bunny Berigan”