Music: Blues Classic

One day nearly 20 years ago, Mildred Bailey lowered her mountainous bulk into her niece's tot-sized red rocking chair to pass the time of day with friend Hoagy Carmichael. When she tried to get up, the chair got up with her. Said Mildred with a laugh: "This ol' rockin' chair's got me, I guess." A month later, Composer Carmichael had finished the song that made Mildred famous:

Ol' rockin' chair's got me Cane by my side Fetch me that gin, son 'Fore I tan yo hide.†

Last week, Mildred was still rocking the customers with her Rockin' Chair. In the Manhattan basement called Café Society, she made the fans wait for what they had all come to hear. Not a pound under weight (at 190) in a shroudlike black gown, her swarthy features and shoe-button eyes gleaming in the spotlight, she teased them first with a couple of new ones — but in the familiar, sweetly sighing Bailey style. ("I couldn't sing big if I wanted to.") When they kept roaring for it, she finally gave them Rockin' Chair with a real tear glistening in her eye.

It was not exactly a "comeback" for Mildred: she has never really been away, in the show-business sense. Now fortyish, she can afford to pick & choose her engagements.

Obviously Mildred had not thrown away the big money she used to make singing with Paul Whiteman and the Rhythm Boys (Bing Crosby, Harry Barris and Al Rinker, who is Mildred's brother) —back in the days when people used to sit up until after midnight listening to that still novel gadget, radio. She had done all right, too, with the band that she and husband Red Norvo (now divorced) had for years.

Mildred owns two busy farms, one in eastern Washington on the Indian reservation where she was born (she is part Indian), another not very far from Tom Dewey's, in upstate New York. She lives comfortably in a Manhattan duplex apartment with three dachshunds and a parrot, drives her Chrysler station wagon to work when she feels like it. In one corner of her living room, she has a stack of her own records that would turn collectors green (many of Mildred's have long been unavailable, but are still eagerly sought after).

Bouncing with energetic plans for her first trip to Paris, Mildred finds it hard to realize that she is somewhat of an old classic. She got a surprise last week when a youngster came up to her after her show and made a confession that many a popular new singer could make: "Mildred, I was brought up on you."

† Copyright Peer International, 1930.