![]() Brooks was not one to bend her songs to the will of popular demand.īrooks collected famous friends - she nicknamed Brando "ballsy" - and was married twice, though neither marriage lasted more than a few months. Jazz articles written about her at the time consistently described her "uncompromising" style. Her most famous song was "A Little Piece of Leather," which appeared on her album "Songs of the 1940s." Other hits recorded for that album included the soft and sweet "As Long As I Live," "I'll Never Be the Same" and "Ballin' the Jack."īrooks didn't so much sing as recite words to the music ("I was a diseuse," she once said). Stella brooks free#Her mother, who raised six more children, rarely spoke to her daughter again.īrooks left San Francisco for New York in the 1930s, after a kind trombone player said, "You're too chic for here," and handed her a steamship ticket.īrooks considered herself part of the "Red McKenzie school of jazz," and her free spirit and sharp tongue made her a hit with jazz buffs. Her mother was remarrying, friends said, and her new husband didn't want to raise another man's children. 24, 1910, Brooks was about 8 years old when her widowed mother sent her away with her siblings to the Jewish Orphans' Home in San Francisco. "It's hard to have been hot s- and be nothing," Brooks, always an intensely private person, admitted to Chronicle reporter Blake Green in 1980.īorn Nov. She went on welfare and spent much of her remaining years in a tiny Tenderloin studio, knitting and watching television. Her health failed - first there were ulcers, then an operation to remove most of her stomach. She stopped singing in clubs and returned to San Francisco, where she watched with resentment the careers of some contemporaries soar higher than hers ever had. "Stella," Holiday once said of her, "is the only white girl I bother to listen to." And for a while, Brooks was nicknamed "the white Billie Holiday."īut life in the New York jazz scene eventually frayed Brooks' psyche, she told The Chronicle in 1980. Williams wrote about her in his "Memoirs," and she counted Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and e.e. Abandoned by her mother at a San Francisco orphanage, she rose from humble beginnings to develop an avid following as an uncompromising and talented jazz singer with a famously sharp tongue. ![]()
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