Moms Mabley

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I really enjoy the TV show The Marvelous Mrs Mazel. If you are not familiar with this show, it is about a Jewish woman named Midge Mazel who tries to build a career as a comedian starting at the end of the nineteen fifties. There are various performers who appear as characters on this show. Some of them have real world inspirations, but they're fictional characters, and there are other ones, like Lenny Bruce, who are fictionalized representations of a real person. Uh. In an episode from the show's third season, Mrs Mazel performs at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and ahead of her on stage is Moms Maybe, who was played wonderfully by Wanda Sykes. If my own age and background were a little different, or maybe if I had grown up watching reruns of old variety shows, I would have already known who this was. But I did not, so I did what I always do when a new performer shows up on The Marvelous Mrs masl and I googled so Mom's Maybe yes was a real person, But I had some doubts about being able to do this episode. Because her career lasted more than six decades. She was hugely influential. She inspired so many comedians and other performers who came after her. She's really one of the founders of stand up comedy in the United States. But outside of her work, a lot of the details of her life are kind of a mystery, and there are some contradictory accounts of a particularly traumatic part of her early life. Heads up that talking about those contradictions is that's going to involve some discussion of rape and other trauma. And I also think if I were part of an adoption triad, there's some part of this that I would probably also find particularly troubling. Moms Mabley was born Loretta Mary Aiken on March nineteen, probably eighteen. In the ninet hundred census, her age is given US three, but in the earliest years of her career, when people might have thought she was too young to be out on her own, she gave her birth year is eighteen ninety four. Later in her life, she was not forthcoming about her age at all, and to add another layer of confusion, her grave marker lists her date of birth as March nineteen, eighteen ninety nine. Loretta's parents were James and Mary Magdalen Smith Aiken. James, who was known as Jim, was the son of Jane Aiken Hall, and his father was her enslaver. Jim was born in eighteen sixty one, and normally that would have meant he was considered enslaved from his birth, but it seems that his five are considered him to be free. According to Mom's Mabley's later accounts, his mother made a particular point of telling both him and Loretta that they had been born free. Loretta also had a great grandmother, Harriet Smith, who she described as Cherokee, who was a big part of her early life and a big influence on her. The family lived in Brevard, North Carolina, which is southwest of Asheville on the edge of what is now Pizga National Forest. In ninet it had a population of under six hundred people. It is easy to imagine that a black family in a small town in the North Carolina Mountains in the early twentieth century was living in severe poverty, and a lot of current descriptions of moms Mabley's imply that her early childhood was one of extreme hardship and that she fled Brevard and never looked back. But in interviews later in her life, Mayblee talked about western North Carolina with just enormous fondness. Studs turn Icle recorded an oral history with her in nineteen sixty one, and she did joke that you had to take a buggy from Asheville to get to Brevard, but she also called it one of the greatest and healthiest places on earth. She spoke of her grandmother and her great grandmother with deep, deep love and respect. Interviews that other people gave after her death also described her making frequent visits home and maintaining her connection to the North Carolina mountains. She also described her father, Jim Aiken, as a great man. He was a successful businessman who had started out selling gingerbread and cider and worked his way up to owning a store along with a bakery, slash cafe, and a barbershop that catered to white customers. He also ran a dray service which carried both passengers and freight along with carrying the mail into and out of town. Although Mabel's oral testimony describes Brevard as not being segregated, it did have segregated schools. Her father was a big part of getting a new school for black children established in Brevard in early nineteen o nine, and a newspaper article about that effort noted his involvement and then said, quote, what Jim undertakes generally goes. I love that quote. Tragically, though, Jim Akin died when Loretta was about twelve. In addition to everything we just mentioned, he was a volunteer firefighter. At this point, most fire trucks were chemical engines. They carried tanks of bicarbonate of soda and acid, which were added to water on the scene to produce a stream of fire suppressant. Something went wrong while Aiken was responding to a call in nineteen o nine and the tank exploded while he was trying to attach the hose. Jim was killed instantly, and multiple other firefighters were seriously injured. Jim Achin's death was a profound loss for the entire community of Brevard. His funeral was held at the White First Baptist Church because that was the biggest church in the area. An editorial in the French broad Hustler described him as quote one colored man who left the world better than he found it. The Brevard News wrote, quote, the death of James P. Aikin is a distinct loss to our town. He was the most widely known colored man in western North Carolina. He was a successful and enterprising businessman whose store on Main Street as well patronized. He was a member of the Baptist Church and several benevolent societies. Was a member of the fire department, where William E. Breece Jr. Was Chief, and was always among the first to respond to the call of the fire bell, and one of the hardest workers at every fire in the history of the town. He was in every way a responsible Negro, honest, energetic, industrious, and reliable. He had a wide influence among the colored race in this mountain section, besides having many friends among the white people, all of whom will be shocked to learn of his death. Obviously, racism is threaded through both of these quotes, with the idea that Jim Aikin was exceptional considering his race, but they do also speak to how prominent he was within the community. Loretta's mother, Mary was the executor of her late husband's estate. She also took over the store while Loretta's grandmother helps to take care of her and her siblings. They did have a big family. She was one of at least nine children. Mary eventually got married again to a man named George Parton, and from that point her name appeared in advertisements for the store as Mary Achin Parton. It appears that she kept the store going until nineteen twelve or nineteen thirteen, at which point she sold the building to Parton and the couple moved away from Brevard, first to Washington, d c. And then to Cleveland, Ohio. A lot of more recent articles about moms maybe say that her mother was killed just a couple of years after her father, after being hit by a truck while crossing the eat on Christmas Day. That's all very sensational, but it does not seem to be correct. Mary and George are listed in the nineteen forty census as living in Cleveland, with George's occupation at the time listed as waiter. It is possible that Mary was killed after being hit by a truck. Tracy was not able to confirm her cause of death, but if she was. That happened in nineteen forty six or nineteen forty seven, and not when Loretta was still a young girl. However, in addition to her father's death, Loretta's life took a traumatic turn when she was still quite young. Multiple sources say that she was raped by two different men before she turned fourteen, and that both times she became pregnant and arranged adoptions for her children, or someone arranged those adoptions for her. Other accounts, though, say that it wasn't really the arrangement of a formal adoption. That Loretta had left her children in the care of two women who later moved away and disappeared, and she didn't get to see her children in until they were adults. Yet other accounts say that Loretta's father or stepfather either forced her to marry a much older man or pressured her to do so, and that is why she left home as a team. But there's no documentation of a marriage, although there is some reporting in Brevard News about a court case in nineteen thirteen that was State versus Bunyan Mills. This was a seduction under promise of marriage case in which the prosecuting witness was named Loretta Aiken. This case was introduced in August, but dismissed in September when it was found that there had been no formal marriage contract. In her conversation with Studs, Turkle Moms Maybe also talked about working as a wet nurse in Asheville at the age of just fourteen and having to deprive her own child of milk so that she would have enough to feed the baby that she was nursing. This recording is truly heartbreaking, with Maybe talking about telling her baby do her, who she calls Lucretia, not to cry because she was stronger than baby Lois, who she was being paid to care for, so Lois needed more to eat. Maybe talked about loving Lois like her own baby and how much it hurt not to know what happened to her after her employment had ended. This interview stresses that Lois started to feel like her own child, but at least to me, it doesn't seem to imply that she had also lost contact with her daughter. Lucretia. Maybe also talked in multiple interviews about being pregnant and having her baby with her at the start of her career, but when Mom's Maybe died in nine. Obituaries and memorials listed four children among her survivors, but none of them are named as Lucretia or are old enough to have been born when moms was fourteen. Yvonne, the oldest daughter, is described as fifty eight at the time of her mother's death. That means that her mother would have been about eighteen when she was born. Yvonne's younger siblings were listed as Christine, Bonnie, and Charles, with some sources noting that Charles was her brother's child who she adopted. So some accounts conclude that Yvonne and Christine were the children who were reunited with maybe as adults, and others conclude that those were just two different people. Yeah. There are also a bunch of family trees that list Christine's middle name as Lucheria, which is not the same as Lucretia, but is close enough that has made people wonder, like, was was this the same baby? Was she calling the baby by a middle name? And like the spelling has gotten garbled somewhere? If so, that means the years are also garbled. There's a bunch that's unclear, but whatever the exact circumstances are the young Loretta Mary Aiken left home at the encouragement of her grandmother, who thought that she should see the world beyond Brevard. And we will get to that after a sponsor brig In that nineteen sixty one oral history with Studs Turkle, Mom's maybe talked about her family's deep religious faith when her grandmother. Sometimes this is also she says it was her great grandmother, Little Blurred encouraged her to leave Brevard. She told her to quote, put God in front and go ahead, and this became a motto for Mom's Mabley's life. The timeline for that life is tricky to piece together, though, because there are plenty of things like advertisements for her performances, but otherwise a lot of the time there's not a lot of concrete documentation. Sometimes Mabley's interviews contradict each other, or they contradict the documentation that does exist, so these like census records. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that she was intentionally deceptive with any of this. Uh. She gave a lot of these interviews in the last couple of decades of her life. Uh. And I know I don't remember actually when things happened in my childhood versus other events, So who knows. It does seem that after her mother moved to Cleveland, Moms maybe still known at that time as Loretta Aiken, went there to join her. She was pregnant at that time as the result of a rape, and she had planned to go from Cleveland to Detroit to terminate that pregnancy, but something told her not to. She told Studs Turkle that when she was fifteen, trying to work out a way to support herself and her child, she prayed for guidance and heard a voice that said quote go on the stage. In Cleveland, Loretta lived with a pastor and his family, and the house next door was a boarding house that was home to a lot of performers. One of them, Bonnie Bell Drew, helped her get a start in show business. Mabley's daughter, Bonnie, who was born in ninety was named Bonnie after Bonnie Bell Drew. Loretta again got a job with the Theater Owners Booking Association, which was a vaudeville circuit for black performers that was established in the nineteen twenties with venues primarily in the southern and Midwestern states. It's performers gave it nicknames like tough on Black actors. The schedules were very grueling the pay was low, but Maybe later said that anyone who got to the end of the circuit had a solid foundation in all kinds of fundamentals, including singing, dancing, and comedy. This was in part because every performer had to learn every part in case somebody got sick or injured, or just dropped out of the show. Other performers who got their start on this circuit included Gertrude Ma Rainey, Josephine Baker, and Sammy Davis Jr. When he was still a child and her later life Mom's Mayblie told a story about being sick while working this circuit and an older fellow performer named Lee Roy came into her room to check on her. Police rated the hotel after an unre related altercation and searched all of the rooms, and when Leroy was found in the room of the teenage Loretta Aiken, they were forced to get married, but according to Mablie, there was no marriage license, no formal paperwork associated with this marriage, and Leroy was more like a father figure to her than a spouse. Loretta was traveling through deeply segregated parts of the US, many of which were also well known for racist violence. She was earning only about fourteen dollars a week, which was not enough to support herself and her child, so her mother was sending money to help with food and lodging. But then another pair of black performers took notice of her and helped her move into higher paying gigs. Those were Jody and Susie Edwards a k a. Butter Beans and Susie, who were a song and dance duo. Their act was very comedic with a lot of double entendre. Their best known song was I Want a Hot Dog for my role. You can find recordings for this on the internet if you want. Honestly, if you've never heard any of Moms Mabley's comedy, just pause this and go to YouTube. Extremely funny. At multiple points while doing research, I stopped what I was doing and watched some Moms Maybe anyway, Loretta moved from the theater Owner's Booking Association, where most of the venues were white owned, to the Chitland Circuit, which was kind of its successor. Those theaters were primarily black owned and operated, and sometime during this period she started performing under the name of Jackie Mablely Maybe herself told multiple stories about where this name came from. One was that jack Mayblee had been a boyfriend and that quote he took a lot off me, and the least I could do was take his name. Another was that the Jackie part was her own invention, but Maybe was the last name of a young man she had been engaged to, but that didn't work out because he was a Canadian and neither of them wanted to move to the others country. Regardless, her motivation for changing her name seems to have been that her oldest brother thought her stage career was disgracing the family. Not all of her family shared that opinion, though she had a younger brother, Eddie Parton, who helped write some of her material. She was being billed as Jackie mable by five, and she had established Jackie as an onstage character. She was in her twenties, but she imagined this character as in her sixties, Patterned after her grandmother Jane. As Jackie Mablee, she would sing, dance, and tell jokes and stories. She eventually made her way to New York, where she was featured at Connie's Inn in Harlem after it opened in ninety three. Like the Cotton Club, where Maybe also went on to perform Connie's in featured black performers for an all white audience. As her reputation grew, Maybe kept getting better and more lucrative bookings. She also claimed that she discovered Pearl Bailey during these years. She said in ninety four interview quote, I taught Pearl Bailey everything she knows. She was a blues singer, and I said, girl, you're funny. You should be a comedian. While mayblee stage career initially included a mix of singing, dancing in comedy, over time she was focused more and more on stand up before that term was even coined. In her stage persona of Jackie Mablee, she helped establish the conventions of stand up comedy as an art form. She was billed as Jackie Mabley for several years before other performers gave her the name of Moms. In her own words quote, even though I was young, they would always bring their problems to me to settle. She was a mothering presence. She was someone that other performers could turn to for support and who would help people get money for rant or a ticket home when they needed it. Mom's Maybe blurred a lot of lines with her gender and sexuality, both on and off stage. Her on stage persona, she wore a baggy house dress, sagging socks, slippers or beat up house shoes, and a floppy hat. Often these clothes aggressively did not go together. She had a stooped posture on the stage, and as she got older and started wearing dentures, she would perform with her teeth out. This persona wasn't exactly androgynous. The character was a woman who went by Moms, but it was blurry enough that various people wrote into newspaper question and answer columns over the course of her career to ask if Mom's Maybe was a man or a woman. As far as her appearance and her demeanor went, Mom's madly stage persona could come off as almost sexless, but at the same time her comedy could be very risk gay. She did not swear. Nothing was sexually graphic in a way that if somebody said that's really risk gay like today, you would imagine something quite different. There was a lot of double entendre, though, and one of Mom's running themes was about her attraction to young men and the uselessness of old men, unless an old man was bringing her a message from a young man off stage. People who performed with Maybe have talked about her openly having relationships with other women. In some photos she's shown as elegantly attired in address and pearls, and in others she's in handsome suits that are more androgynous, are almost aggressively masculine. In the documentary Whoopie Goldberg Presents Moms Maybe, dancer and comedian Norma Miller said quote, we never called Moms a homosexual. That word never fit her. We never called her gay. We called her Mr. Moms. Let's carry it over to her comedy and to the venues where she performed as well. For example, in April of nineteen thirty four, the Ubangie Club opened on the former site of Connie's. In One of its frequent headline acts was Gladys Bentley, who was an openly lesbian performer who wore men's attire and was sometimes backed up by drag queens. You Bangie Club became known for both performers and clientele who we would probably describe as LGBTQ today, and one of its performers was Mom's. Maybe we will get into Mom's Mabley's later career after we paused for a sponsor break. A lot of Mom's. Mabley's comedy career was really unique for the time. Most women working in comedy or on the stage at all were as part of a duo with a man, but Mabley was a solo act. In nine she became the first woman's a headline at the Apollo Theater as a solo comedian. For decades, she was really the only black woman doing solo stand up, and again, this started before that term was even coined. She was also appearing on Broadway in the nineteen thirties, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. At this point, there were several Broadway productions with all black casts, but they often had white directors and producers, and they were tailored for a white audience, but the show's mainly appeared in were developed and directed by black people, or they were otherwise focused on the black experience. In general, these shows did not run for long. They're often described as not appealing to white audiences and critics. In nineteen thirty one, she was in Fast and Furious, a colored review in thirty seven scenes at the New Yorker Theater. In addition to being part of the casts, Maybe worked with author and anthropologists Orneil Hurston to develop some of the sketches, and Hurston appeared in this show as well. Then she was in Max Rednecks Blackberries of nineteen thirty two, a CPIA musical review. This ran at Liberty Theater west of odd Way on forty two Street, and it ran for twenty five performances. Then there was Swinging the Dream in ninety nine, which I am just desperately curious about. This was a swing musical adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with a cast that included Butterfly McQueen and Louis Armstrong. It ran for thirteen performances. Uh. Reviews of it were not great. And I cannot imagine why this sounds incredible to me. I mean, I can't imagine why. The answer wise racism, but I'm still it's this sounds incredible to me. Uh. Most of the script has been lost, which is one of the reasons I'm just desperately curious about it. We'll put it on the time machine list. It's one of the stops will make mainly had some small film roles during these same years. Like her Broadway rules, these were in films that were made by and four black people, a genre that became known as race films. One of these was Emperor Jones, which came out in three starring musician, actor, and activist Paul Robeson. Her film work continued into the nineteen forties, including playing her comedic persona in Killer Diller, which came out in nine. In Night, she played a boarding house matron in boarding House Blues, in which the boarding houses residents who are all performers, put on a show to save moms and her boarding house from bankruptcy. The thing that she became the most known for during these years was her comedy. On stage, she booked longer and longer contracts at the Apollo, ultimately appearing there more than any other entertainer and earning as much as ten thousand dollars a week. She constantly changed up her acts that would continue to appeal to returning members of the audience, and soon she was nicknamed the funniest woman in the world. As the civil rights movement evolved in the nineteen fifties and sixties, Mabley's comedy started to include more and more social satire and commentary about racism, sexism, and Paula ticks. This continued as white audiences became more aware of her with the evolution of comedy albums. Maybe recorded her first album, Funniest Woman Alive, before a live audience in Chicago in nineteen sixty and it was released by Chess Records. It was a hit, and she went on to record ninety more comedy albums during her career, many of which made the Billboard two hundred. Her nineteen sixty one Moms Maybe at the u N hit number sixteen on the Billboard charts, which was the highest ranking comedy album by a woman, and that record stood for the next decade. As Maybe became more well known to white audiences, she used her disarming stage persona to make social and political commentary that probably would have been impossible without it. Her sets included fictional conversations with world leaders where she set them straight on various wrongs. She made pointed observations about the realities of racism and segregation. For a example, on her nineteen sixty three album I Got Something to tell You, she said, quote, you know the first thing I would do if I was president, I would give a certain Southern governor a job as ambassador to the Congo and let him go crazy looking for a men's restroom with white on it. Throughout the nineteen sixties, she also did benefit performances to raise money for causes like Southern Students Freedom Fund, which provided aid for students who had been arrested for their civil rights activism. She did a show at the Apollo Theater to raise money for the March on Washington, and she sold photographs during some of her shows to raise money for the Selma to Montgomery March. She was also a member of the n double A CP, and she attended the White House Conference on Civil Rights in nineteen sixty six that inspired her album Mom's Maybe at the White House. She also gave multiple performances at prisons all over New York, including Sing Sing and Riker's Island. Mabley's television debut was also connected to all of this. In nineteen sixty seven, Harry Belafonte produced A Time for Laughter, a look at Negro humor in America. Bellefonte described this as an effort to both demonstrate black people's humanity for the white world and to inspire joy and laughter within the black community. That was the first time Mom's made Lee was on TV. Maybe had long talked about seeing her audiences as her children, and when she started doing television, she said, quote, the only difference I found when I started doing TV was that instead of looking at the audience as my children, I looked at the world as my children. She appeared on multiple televised comedy programs and variety shows, including The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Carol Burnett Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Flip Wilson Show. These television appearances introduced her to a larger white audience than her albums had, and that fed into bookings at venues like the Kennedy Center. But at that point she'd been performing and famous among black audiences for fifty years. In nineteen sixty nine, Mom's Mayblee's cover of Abraham, Martin and John, which is the song about the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln Martin, Luther King Jr. John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy, hit number thirty five on the Billboard Charts. She performed this song as Moms, but it was a completely serious and audibly grief stricken performance. In the nineteen seventies, Maybley's comedy included her opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War, and in the nineteen seventy two interviews she said quote, I've shed many a tear over those boys. I wanted to go over there, but the government said I was too old. But if I'd gone over there, I'd have said, come on, children, let's go home. Also in nineteen seventy two, she supported past podcast subjects Shirley Chisholm's election campaign and appeared at a Stars for Shirley fundraiser. In nineteen seventy four, Moms Mayblie made her last TV appearance as a presenter at the Grammy Awards with Chris Christopherson. At the time, Stofferson was thirty eight, and the two of them played up Mom's attraction to young men. Made asked him the name of the song he wrote, and after he replied, help me make it through the night, answering quote, if you can make it for half an hour, It'll be all right with me. Their banter went on for a full five minutes before announcing the award that went to Gladys Night In the pips and Maybley took her teeth out in the middle of it. It's amazing. You can see this on YouTube. Also good also in vour. Maybe had her first lead in a feature film. This was called Amazing Grace and she played Grace Teasdale Grimes. It's about a woman who goes up against a corrupt politician and it's posters read quote, Who's coming to put an end to dirty tricks, crooked politicians and lion mayors? Who America's most glamorous, sexiest female superstar moms. Maybe It's about time. Maybe had a heart attack during the production for this film. She returned to the set after having a casemaker implanted, and she used her publicity for the film to promote voting. But this was her last appearance on screen. She died on May five in White Plains, New York, at the age of about seventy eight. She was survived by four children, five grandchildren, two sisters, and three brothers, including her brother Eddie Parton, who had helped write some of her material. She had spent her last years living with her daughter Bonnie. At least five hundred people attended her funeral, and the marquis at the Apollo Theater was changed to read Harlem mourns Moms Maybe. Comedian Dick Gregory gave a eulogy in which he said that if she had been white, she would have been known fifty years before today. Mom's Maybe is known as one of the founders of American stand up comedy. A lot of later comedians have cited her as an inspiration, including Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Wanda Pyke's, Arsenio Hall, and Whoopie Goldberg, who, as we said, made a documentary about Moms in originally called I Got Something to Tell You before it was picked up by HBO. In the nineteen eighties, Clary's Taylor worked with playwright Alice Childress to write a play called Moms, which debuted at the Astor Place Theater in the character of Granny Clump and Eddie Murphy's The Nuttie Professor is also a tribute to her man in Mom's Mable his own words, her influence was more pervasive than all of that quote. There's not a comedian in show business that hasn't stolen material from moms, not white or black, as fast as they steal them. God gives me some more. I love her genius. Uh and, as I said, I had multiple times just stops what I was doing and watched some I watched Mom's mainly on YouTube, and I also watched a Wanda Psyke's appearance as her on Marvelous Mrs Maisel. I watched that three or four additional more times working on So yeah, I think a lot of her comedy definitely holds up. I have not listened every to every single album she has ever done, so I don't think I can make a blanket statement that every Mom's mainly joke has weathered the years well, but a lot of it is still hilarious. UM. I have listener mail. It's from Christine and it's it's actually an Instagram message. Christine said, I just had to send this to you considering you just said an episode on the history of unicorns and I don't remember this being mentioned. Have a great day. Several folks have sent us this video and the video just went up yesterday, I think as of when we are recording this, and it is a video called did Unicorns Exist? And it is talking about the extinct animal Elastmotherium sibericum also called the Siberian unicorn. What one of the things that the video talks about is that it is believed to have gone extinct at least a hundred thousand years ago, but there's radio carbon dating that suggests it was more like thirty nine thousand years ago, so this animal would have existed alongside prehistoric humans. Maybe this is the origin of unicorn myths. Here's the thing though, this video has like the most horse like illustration of this animal most of them, it looks much much more like a rhinoceros with an almost buffalo like hump um very rhinocerosy, and also they were twice as big as rhinoceroses are. Um, it's not impossible that people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where the where these lived um had some kind of oral tradition relating to them. But there's a way clearer progression from the Indian subcontinent through Greece and Rome into Europe, which is what we we traced on that episode. So thanks to everyone who has sent us that video. If you would like to write to us, we're a history podcast at i heeart radio dot com and we're all over social media at miss in History's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app and anywhere else that you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.