Considered a Great Male Jazz Vocalist - Performed With Count Basie Troupe
By JOHN S. WILSON
Jimmy Rushing, the rotund blues-singer who came out of Kansas City with the Count Basie Orchestra in 1936, died yesterday morning after a brief illness. He was 68 years old and lived at 88-35 164th Street Jamaica, Queens. Until he entered Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital on May 12, he had been singing on week-ends at the Half Note, Spring and Hudson Streets.
Mr. Rushing sang the blues in an intense, high-pitched voice that gave an unusual sense of urgency to his performances. In his later years, a huskiness sometimes thickened what had once been a bright, penetrating vocal sound, but it never completely obscured the individuality and warmth when [sic] led some jazz experts to consider him the greatest of the male jazz singers.
Ralph Ellison, the novelist, who grew up in Oklahoma City when Mr. Rushing was getting his start there, remembers his voice in those days as "high and clear and poignantly lyrical."
Steel Bright, Silky Smooth
"Steel bright in its upper range and, at its best, silky smooth," Mr. Ellison once wrote in describing Mr. Rushing's voice. "It is possessed of a purity somehow impervious to both the stress of singing above a 12-piece band and the urgency of Rushing's own blazing fervor."
"On dance nights, when you stood on the rise in the school grounds two blocks to the east," Mr. Ellison recalled, "you could hear it jetting from the dance hall like a blue flame in the dark; now soaring high above the trumpets and the trombones, now skimming the froth of reeds and rhythm as it called some woman's anguished name - or demanded in a high, thin, passionately lyrical line, "baaaaaay-bay, bay-aaaay-bay! tell me what's the matter now?" - above the shouting of the swinging band.
As a child in Oklahoma City, where he was born on Aug. 26, 1903, the son of a trumpet-playing father and a mother who sang, Mr. Rushing taught himself how to play the violin. "But, man," he later said, "I had to do more than that to get across what I wanted to say." He studied music theory in high school and became a competent reading musician, a rarity among blues singer [sic].
His singing career began in California in 1925 where he played piano and sang in after-hours clubs. In 1927 he
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returned to Oklahoma City, where he joined Walter Page's Blue Devils as a singer.
The following year Count Basie became the band's pianist and in 1931, when Mr. Page broke up his group, Mr. Rushing, Mr. Basie and Mr. Page all moved into Bennie Moten's Band, which was based in Kansas City and was one of the most popular bands in the southwest.
After Mr. Moten's death in 1935, the three musicians stayed together in a nine-piece band, under Mr. Basie's leadership, that played at the Reno Club in Kansas City. Scale was $15 a week, the band played from 8 P.M. until 4 the next morning except Saturday nights, when it played from 8 P.M. until 8 A.M. Sunday, a seven-day week.
During this period of "scuffling," Mr. Basie said that he would have given up except for Mr. Rushing's urgings that he "stick with it."
When the band, expanded to 13 pieces, left Kansas City in 1936 to go to Chicago and to New York and to fame, Mr. Rushing went with it, singing the blues almost exclusively at Mr. Basie's insistence although he had begun as a ballad singer and had continued to sing ballads as often as blues. It was his beginning as a ballad singer, Mr. Ellison theorized, which gave his blues interpretation their special quality.
"One of the significant aspects of his art," Mr. Ellison wrote, "is the imposition of a romantic lyricism upon the blues tradition, a lyricism which is not of the Deep South but of the southwest, a romanticism native to the frontier."
Mr. Rushing remained with the Basie band until 1950. During these years he recorded many songs with the orchestra that became closely associated with him, "Sent For You Yesterday and Here You Come Today," Good Morning, Blues," "Goin' to Chicago," "Harvard Blues" and "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town" among others.
In addition, Mr. Rushing's short and squat appearance was the inspiration for the song, "Mr. Five by Five."
From 1950 until 1952 he led a seven-piece band that played at the Savoy Ballroom. Since then he had performed as a single, travelling widely in the United states and in Europe, and, in 1964, to Australia.
He leaves his wife, Connie, and two sons, Robert and William.
A funeral service will be held Monday at 11 A.M. at St. Peter's Lutheran Church, Lexington Avenue and 54th Street.
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