© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Previously Steve Siegel reached out to the editorial staff at JazzProfiles and inquired if we would have any interest in featuring his writing on these pages.
Since that initial correspondence how work on pianist Wade Legge, the Great Day in Harlem Photography “Mystery Man” - William J. Crump, drummer Frankie Dunlop and Jimmy Rushing recordings following his time on the Basie Band have featured on these pages.
Here’s a brief biography which Steve sent along.
“My interest in jazz began in 1970 when, as a college student, I took a course entitled “Afro-American Music" – code for “jazz” ( In the late 1960’s a course with the title “jazz" in it may have had a difficult time getting through a college's curriculum committee, because it might not be considered a rigorous enough topic to grant college credit for). Over the subsequent 50 years I have collected approximately 2500 jazz recordings- all on vinyl, and over 250 books which deal with jazz biography, the history of jazz, jazz criticism and jazz's relationship to other art forms.
I spent 36 years in academia and upon retirement in 2013 pursued a second career as a fine arts photographer. My true objective was to finally get around to writing about jazz. Recently I embarked upon a series of human interest articles which focus upon the lives of jazz artists who were active from the bebop era through the 1960’s and are no longer with us, but have a compelling story that, perhaps due to the vicissitudes of time, was lost to history.”
© -Steve Siegel copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.
“Back at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century it was common for a newborn of less-well-to-do parents to be brought into this world not by doctors but by midwives. As a result, there generally existed no birth certificate and the exact date of birth was dependent on a family’s collective memory. The lack of any official documentation also created opportunities for people to modify their date-of-birth for their own benefit. These “little white lies” could benefit celebrities lying about their age to avoid age discrimination which caused them to be disqualified from winning certain roles intended for younger actors or actresses. During times of war men sometimes lied about their age (older or younger) in order to enlist, while others might have lied to avoid being drafted.
But what are we to make about a public figure, recognized as one of the seminal jazz and blues singers of the 20th century who, in his lifetime, provided 4 different birth years to various sources with presumably the knowledge that all 4 were inaccurate and why did he fail to ever reveal the correct year, which he presumably knew? So goes the story of Jimmy Rushing and his very elusive birth year.
Because of the large numbers of future jazz artists who were of Afro-American descent and born into poverty, biographers and historians have often struggled to pin down an accurate date of their birth and frankly when a writer is documenting his subject’s entire existence, wasting time trying to confirm any given date with no birth certificate readily available or even possibly existing, is of a secondary concern. Louis Armstrong's accurate birthdate was only confirmed long after his death.
As I was writing the article about Rushing’s post Basie period of 1950 to 1971, I discovered that in Rushing, we have an extreme case of birth year confusion. If you were to google “Jimmy Rushing Birth Year” you will come up with multiple listings of: 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, “1902 or 1903,” “1902?,” “sometime between 1901 and 1903.” Amazingly enough ALL these years are incorrect. The only consistency across all these inaccurate dates is the month and date of his birth, August 26 - and even that date is controversial.
The actual story here is not only the elusiveness of the correct birth year but why all these incorrect dates were utilized by Rushing or by reputable sources throughout his life. Where did these dates come from and what might Rushing (or perhaps his record company) feel he had to gain through proffering them?
One birthdate often associated with Rushing in published books and articles is August 26, 1903. The first mentions that I could find of that date appearing in print, were in the liner notes to the 1957 album, Basie at Newport, as well as in an interview with Nat Hentoff in Downbeat Magazine’s March 6, 1957 issue. It does appear though that he might have been providing that date as early as the 1940s. Even today we still find great currency given to that date. There appears to be no historical information to support this date and probably was an invention of Rushing's to shave 4 years off his true age. In fact, the 1910 census of the Rushing family, taken in February of 1910, lists Evoid Rushing, Jimmy's younger brother, as being 6 years old as of February 1910, with a December birthdate. This indicates that HE was also born in 1903. Evoid and Jimmy were not twins, so the 1903 birth year goes to Evoid and not Jimmy.
In 1957, Rushing was turning 58. In those days, this age would be considered entry level old age. Given the opportunity to provide biographical data to Columbia as well as to Hentoff for the article, perhaps it appeared to him to be beneficial to give the “vanity age" of 54, providing Rushing a few more years of “headroom" before turning the ancient age of 60.
The other incorrect birth year that gained wide currency later in his life was 1901. This year first appeared on his Social Security Application for Account Number, filed on June 4, 1938. This application was filled out in his handwriting and signed by him. Because of the absence of a birth certificate there existed no official document to corroborate that birth date. So essentially Rushing could enter any reasonable date he saw fit; basically, an honor system. This application now became the official governmental document which subsequently was often used as a source of Rushing's “official” age by sources writing about Rushing.
The infrequently used year of 1900 came about when Rushing, in accordance with the Selective Service Act of 1917, registered in late summer of 1918 for World War I, using the date of August 26, 1900. He was still living home at this time and it is difficult to believe that Rushing or his parents did not know that he was born in 1899 (the correct birth year). After all, in the 1910 census which occurred before he turned 11, his parents had accurately listed him as 10 years old, which indicated a birth date in 1899. Was he trying to avoid being drafted? Probably not because even with the 1900 date he was still 18, the minimum age to be drafted at that point in the war.
1902 was the most controversial of all the listed birth years. In 1994, Rushing was one of 8 jazz artists honored with his picture on a United States Postal Service stamp. On the stamp, they listed his year of birth as 1902, based on information provided by his widow, Connie. A search of the 1910 census reveals that Rushing's sister Ethyl was listed as 8 years old in 1910, making 1902 her birth year and eliminating any possibility that Jimmy was born in 1902 and even casting doubt on 1901.
The controversy over the 1902 date's presence on the stamp, led to some research efforts to try to definitively determine the real year of Rushing's birth. Then Historian-in-Residence Currie Ballard of Langston University uncovered the true year of 1899, presumably from the 1900 census, which upon review by this author, is confirmed. This birth year was definitive because Rushing was listed as 10 months old on the day in June 1900 when the census taker surveyed the Rushing family. Therefore, Jimmy Rushing had to be born before 1900. Evidently the revelation of this information from an academic source outside the jazz world never received wide currency, which might account for the inaccurate birth years still circulating in jazz circles to this day.
One further mystery surrounds that census entry from 1900. The census taker lists the month of Rushing's birth as “June," not August, though the fact that he was listed on the same census line as 10 months old in June of 1900, seems to confirm the August 26, 1899 date. This might simply have been a transcription error when census forms were copied over into ledgers.
One written source has speculated that the June date is accurate and the August date might have been created to spare his parents the shame of conceiving a child before they were legally married. This explanation is flawed because his parent’s wedding certificate indicates that they were married on July 11, 1898. Therefore, no need existed to modify the birthdate in order to conform with the social mores of the times.
In conclusion, all the available evidence clearly supports August 26, 1899 as the correct birthdate of James Andrew Rushing.
Research assistant: Nancy Sheridan Siegel
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