Mama Yancey

The spouse from the blues team led by pioneering boogie-woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey, Estelle “Mama” Yancey was a talented vocalist known on her behalf warm love of life and great command from the stage. In her youth, Estelle Harris sang in cathedral choirs and discovered electric guitar. Jimmy Yancey, who acquired journeyed the U.S. and European countries being a vaudeville dancer, wedded Estelle in 1917, when she was 21. Yancey frequently sang with her hubby at casual gatherings, house-rent celebrations, and night clubs in the 1930s and ’40s in Chicago. Because Jimmy Yancey had not been that great a blues vocalist, but was an excellent boogie-woogie/blues piano participant, Estelle recorded often with her hubby. Yancey sang with her spouse in 1948 at Carnegie Hall, which performance subsequently resulted in Jimmy Yancey’s last documenting with Mama, Pure Blues, in 1951 for any fledgling Atlantic Information. Jimmy Yancey passed away a couple of months later on from a heart stroke due to problems from diabetes, but Estelle continuing to execute and record. One of the better types of her soulful, expressive vocals are available on an recording for Atlantic, Jimmy and Mama Yancey: Chicago Piano, Vol. 1. Mama Yancey’s recordings with additional pianists consist of South Part Blues for the Riverside label (1961), some information with Artwork Hodes for Verve in 1965, and perhaps I’ll Cry with Erwin Helfer for the Crimson Coffee beans label in 1983, documented at age group 87. Yancey passed away in 1986.