Pioneers–Sophie Tucker, Shelton Brooks, Some of these Days

We are about to leave 1932, as we travel along with Bing Crosby at the intersection of Broadway and Jazz. We are going to look at two songs today, one that came from 1910 and the ragtime era; the second came from the Great Depression.

Shelton Brooks was an African-American composer who was having a hard time getting his music sung. Here is Sophie Tucker’s first hand account of how he got his 1910 song, “Some of These Days” heard. Never doubt the power of an angry employee! This comes from her 1945 autobiography, “Some of These Days.”

“Some of These Days” is one thing more I owe in a way to Mollie [Elkins, Miss Tucker’s maid]. I was riding high in Chicago, palling around with a fast crowd, too full of myself to pay attention to a lot of what was happening around me. Many song writers used to bring me their work, beg me to try the songs in my act and plug them. Every performer is beseiged with that sort of thing. At first you hear them all, consider them all, you’re so fearful of missing a good thing. But after a few years of it you get careless. I guess it was that way with me.

One day Mollie came and stood in front of me, hands on hips, and a look in her eye that I knew meant she had her mad up.

‘See here, young lady,’ said she, ‘since when are you so important that you can’t hear a song by a colored writer? Here’s this boy Shelton Brooks hanging around, waiting, like a dog with his tongue hanging out, for you to hear his song. And you running around, flapping your wings like a chicken with its head chopped off. That’s no way for you to be going on, giving a nice boy like that the run-around.’

‘All right. I’ll hear his song,’ I promised. ‘You tell him.’

‘You can tell him yourself,’ said Mollie. And she brought him in.

The minute I heard “Some of These Days” I could have kicked myself for almost losing it. A song like that. It had everything. Hasn’t it proved it? I’ve been singing it for thirty years, made it my theme song. I’ve turned it inside out, singing it every way imaginable, as a dramatic song, as a novelty number, as a sentimental ballad, and always audiences have loved it and asked for it. “Some of These Days” is one of the great songs that will be remembered and sung for years and years to come, like some of Stephen Foster’s.

Later Shelton Brooks wrote “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” which I sang too, but nothing else he ever did touched “Some of These Days.”

Sophie Tucker first recorded the song in 1911.