Betty Roché - Trouble Trouble

by Steve Voce
Mary Elizabeth Roché, singer, born Wilmington, Delaware, 9 January, 1920, died Pleasantville, New Jersey, 16 February 1999. This piece appeared in The Independent, Tuesday, March 23, 1999.

If ever anyone was at the right place at the wrong time, then it was Betty Roché.
Despite the inspiration and sure-footed nature of his music, Duke Ellington's taste in band singers proved controversial, and most of them only found grudging acceptance from jazz fans. But nobody argued over Betty Roché.

She had a particularly clear diction, and her style was light and swinging, particularly suited to Ellington's music of the Forties. Her recording of Ellington's signature tune, "Take The A Train," with the band in 1952 has remained one of the most famous of Ellington's recordings. Despite it, Roché slipped through a crack in the floorboards.

Ivie Anderson had been the singer with the Ellington band throughout the Thirties. "Poor health" was the altruistic reason given for her leaving the band in 1942. But in fact she left to oversee the running of her Los Angeles restaurant, "Ivie's Chicken Shack". Ellington replaced her with a trio of girl singers. One of them, Phyllis Smiley, left fairly quickly. Another, Joya Sherrill, had to leave the band at the end of the summer to go back to school. The third girl, Roché, stayed on.

Like so many future stars, Roché had started off by winning a talent contest at Harlem's Apollo Theatre when she was 17. This led eventually to her joining the Savoy Sultans, the resident band at the Savoy Ballroom, in 1941. Typifying the episodic nature of Roché's career, the band broke up soon after she joined it. She made her first record on the band's last recording session, a song called "At's In There". She also sang briefly for bands led by the tenor sax player Lester Young and trumpeter Hot Lips Page.

She travelled to Hollywood with the Ellington band to make the film "Reveille With Beverly" in October, 1942. The film also featured Frank Sinatra and the Count Basie and Bob Crosby bands as well as Ellington's. Roché was to sing "Take The A Train". The A Train was a subway train that famously travelled through New York to Harlem. Roché's lyrics said of the train, "You'll find it's the quickest way to get to Harlem." In a typical Hollywood generalization the train in the film as she sang was shown racing across the open prairie.

The American musicians' union (the AFM) had imposed a ban on recording that lasted throughout Roché's period with Ellington and she was thus denied the fame that would undoubtedly have come to her had she been featured on the band's records. In January 1943 Ellington's became the first black band to give a concert at Carnegie Hall. That evening he gave the first performance of one of his most controversial compositions, his 45-minute "Black, Brown and Beige" suite.

Roché sang the famous "Blues" section, with its pyramid-like construction of lyrics. This piece was designed to express the feelings of black life in the cities of America at the beginning of the century. The concert was recorded, but the results were not issued until 40 years later. By the time Ellington was able to record a studio version in 1944, Roché had left the band.

Complete on  >>  http://www.jazzinchicago.org/educates/journal/articles/betty-roch