Anna Robinson

The majority of what we realize approximately Anna Robinson originates from Bass Lines, the autobiography of bassist Milt Hinton, who all remembers her seeing that “Ann Robinson.” Hinton arrived in NY during the past due 1920s, and fulfilled her when she was surviving in a swank house on Glucose Hill, within a community largely filled by effective Afro-American entertainers. Robinson, who at that time was utilized by the Natural cotton Club being a dancer in an organization billed because the Three Tempo Queens, has been a strikingly outspoken and sexually liberated girl. Hinton recalls going to her in the home where she believed nothing of getting visitors within the nude while cigarette smoking marijuana and performing alongside phonograph information. She has been a hardcore, joyous, anarchic libertine. Probably her life-style has something regarding the sketchiness of her obtainable history. Information relating to exact dates is nearly completely absent. Following the end from the run on the Natural cotton Club, her following regular gig included appearing being a single action at Monroe’s Uptown Home, where she danced much less and focused even more on comedic performing. Based on Hinton, Robinson had written original music and also got a means of composing “smart hip lyrics” which she arranged to established regular well-known melodies. (This process would later on become known through the ’50s and ’60s as vocalese, a method most famously proven by Ruler Pleasure, Eddie Jefferson, and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.) Hinton particularly observed how “Nat Cole and several other stars documented some of her music” lengthy afterwards, but that she didn’t receive credit on her behalf compositions or innovative concepts. Hinton also kept in mind “show people from downtown” going to Monroe’s looking for “fresh materials for their very own serves.” He insisted that Martha Raye in fact based a few of her routines on Robinson’s materials. Hinton also likened the two females stating that both had been dancers with unusually wide mouths, who included this physical quality to their comedic shows. Sometime through the past due ’30s, Robinson performed her very own songs being a star in a few type of “New Encounters” revue, about which nothing at all more continues to be uncovered. She also produced several three-minute information on March 9, 1939 with Jimmy Johnson & His Orchestra, a music group whose associates included Henry Crimson Allen, J.C. Higginbotham, Gene Sedric, and Sid Catlett. Another vocalist over the time was Ruby Smith. Johnson’s “Hungry Blues,” a melody in the short-lived pro-labor stage present De Organizer, acquired poignant anti-racist lyrics by Langston Hughes. Robinson’s approach to managing this politically outspoken opus was effective, gutsy, and hauntingly bittersweet. “Harlem Woogie” conserved for most of period the rowdy, “party pet” facet of Anna Robinson. She lashed out with guttural scatting and transformed a sizzling hot record right into a pretty twisted screen of raucous, outrageous abandon. Apart from a second edition of “Starving Blues” documented June 15, 1939, that is evidently everything that survives of Anna Robinson on record. Hinton stated to have constructed a music group and supported her up as she sang her first music on her very own recording program “at one stage in the mid-forties,” but he wasn’t alert to what became of these discs, and doubted that that they had ever been released to the general public. The others of her tale can be grim; Robinson became dependent on heroin, stopped executing but continued to market her songs, nurturing never if she’d ever receive composer credits or royalties, but just looking for profit order to fund her habit. Anna Robinson was murdered within an alley behind her Harlem house building within a homicide evidently from the underground narcotics trade. Somebody cut her neck and still left her there to perish. The rest can be silence.