LEE WILEY
Anytime, Any day, Anywhere
I grew up in a tenement, in Brooklyn, in the 1950s, witness to an ongoing war between my mother and the man I mistakenly took for my father. As I’ve stated elsewhere, she disliked me and my two brothers, all three of us sons of different fathers, as a constant reminder of her lousy lifestyle choices.
The only solace she had until an act of domestic violence put an end to the arguments, and she’d finally had enough with that miserable and cruel little fuckwad and took off with us, cutting him out of our lives, was a stack of LPs.
These records accompanied her for the rest of her life on the east coast. She spent the last years of her life in Northern California, and I had little or no contact with her for the last twenty years of her life, but I assume her tastes remained pretty much the same.
She loved the female singers of the first half of the twentieth century; not unconditionally, to be sure. Rosalind had a critical ear. Tops of her pops were Judy Garland and Edith Piaf, two singers whose self pity echoed, reflected and justified my mother’s perfectly. Seeing Judy at Carnegie Hall might have been the best night of her otherwise drab and fairly miserable life.
Entre nous, the last actual laugh I got out of her, the day I gave her a portrait of Judy Garland I’d painted for her birthday, was my commitment to never outing her as a middle aged homosexual.
But there were others in that stack of often played long playing records. Connee Boswell, Kay Starr, Jo Stafford, Ginny Simms, Margaret Whiting, and, the subject of this entry, Lee Wiley.
These records, along with the Doo Wop 45s my cousin filled my ears with—more on all that street corner harmony and a capella echo in an upcoming essay—were the soundtrack of my boyhood. I loved my mother’s records, and my music collection today includes all of those singers mentioned above, and a slew of men and women she never listened to, as far as I know and recall.
But by my teens, after our disaffection had turned to hostile distaste, along with lost contact, I put those recordings in the back of my mind, and explored new tastes and new directions. Folk music, psychedelic rock, Western Swing. Significantly, or not, no Beatles or Rolling Stones, but a small smattering of the second British wave.
Until, that is, I went to work for Gil Kane, a contemporary of my mother, who had in his youth shared much of Rosalind’s tastes, but had moved on from them, with a few exceptions, including the recordings of Lee Wiley. And, unlike my mother, as far as I know, he’d actually seen and heard her live in her 1950s iteration of society night spot chanteuse.
A few years later, after I had gone pro, I found myself, as I often did, hanging around the coffee room at DC comics, which is what we all did, ostensibly waiting for potential work, while mostly just bullshitting, and flirting with the girls who worked at Independent News, which shared the floor and the break room.
On this particular day, I got up to do a constitutional walk through the offices, and ran into Gil, who was chatting with Julie Schwartz. I had no notion of any importance this casual stroll might have, but it began, or perhaps restarted, my musical education, which continues to this day.
Gil and Julie were both serious jazz fans, only a decade apart in age, but lightyears from each other in their tastes, their opinions, their deeply felt choices in the music.
Julie was a devout fan of traditional jazz, what I’d come to know was referred to disparagingly by swing and modern fans as a Mouldy Fig. He was an exponent of The Austin High Gang, a group of what had been teenagers in the early days of Louis Armstrong’s explosive emergence on the scene, most of whom continued to play this 1920s approach to the music for the rest of their lives, in a few cases as late as the 1970s.
An example of Julie’s perspective is his insistence that the saxophone wasn’t a jazz instrument. Really.
Gil, on the other hand, had grown up with the big bands, and was a devoted progressive enthusiast, a Stan Kenton fan. I have always believed this obsession with the Kenton band, to my ears then and now rather lumbering, is what led him away from jazz and into his late in life obsession with classical music.
To be clear, they disagreed about almost everything. Among those rare exceptions was their shared admiration for Lee Wiley. Her very mention brought a smile to both their faces.
I vaguely recalled her name from my mother’s record collection, but, since I respected both their judgment, I bought an LP of her 30s recordings. I wasn’t hooked, at first. Her voice seemed small, detached and brittle; the antithesis of, say, the emotional cascade of Garland or Piaf.
It took a while, but finally, it took. Wiley had a small voice, that demanded a closer listen, a keener attention. And I became a lifelong fan.
Her biography describes what was once called, with unfortunate and unkind condescension, an adventuress. A citizen of the Cherokee nation, she fled Oklahoma and made a career for herself, recording with a number of players out of that above mentioned Austin High gang, collaborating with her first husband, pianist Jess Stacy, a marriage that would have played for comedy in the movies but sounds like a fucking nightmare for both in real life.
Wiley did the requisite girl singer thing with a number of big bands, Leo Reisman, Glenn Gray, and Paul Whiteman among them, but her great work was as a solo with a small combo. This was true for three decades, delivering a sophisticated take on the best of the American Popular Songbook, with a sensuous and subtle voice that draws me in, to this very afternoon.
I’m reminded of a line from PAT & MIKE, a Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn frothfest. Tracy says, in regard to Hepburn, “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce.”
There wasn’t a lot of voice in Lee Wiley, but what was there was definitely choice.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince.