Billy Eckstine (1914-1993)

October 18, 2010 
/ Contributed By: Michelle Granshaw

Billy Eckstine|

Billy Eckstine

Photo by William Gottlieb

Multi-talented performer Billy Eckstine, known as โ€œMr. B.,โ€ was a jazz musician and balladeer who gained popularity during the post-World War II era. His good looks, fashionable style and smooth baritone vocals led to a long and successful musical career, earning a place as DOWNBEATโ€™s most popular singer for five consecutive years.

He was born William Clarence Eckstein in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on July 8, 1914. Eckstine learned to play piano as a child and became a teen football star. Around 1930, Eckstine moved to Washington, D.C., to live with an older sister and later attended St. Paul Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia where he worked on a degree in physical education. Eventually he transferred to Howard University.

After winning a singing contest in New York, he dropped out of college in 1933 and began club appearances in Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Chicago. Around this time, he changed his name from Eckstein to Eckstine (his grandparentsโ€™ original spelling) and acquired the nickname โ€œMr. B.โ€ Bandleader Earl Hines heard Eckstineโ€™s act and hired him as its lead vocalist in 1939. While working with Hinesโ€™s band, Eckstine recorded โ€œJelly, Jelly,โ€ and โ€œSkylark.โ€ Both songs became national hits. Although a proficient trombonist, Eckstine also learned to play trumpet and performed with musicians Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan.

In 1943 Eckstine formed an innovative swing band that specialized in bebop. Before disbanding in 1947, Eckstine played trumpet alongside musicians Lucky Thompson, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro, Art Blakey, Eugene Ammons, Kenny Dorham, Miles Davis, Oscar Pettiford and Clyde Hart.

In the mid-1940s, Eckstine turned to solo vocal recordings and had a stream of hits including โ€œBlowinโ€™ the Blues Awayโ€ (1944), โ€œOpus Xโ€ (1944), โ€œEverything I Have is Yoursโ€ (1947), โ€œBlue Moonโ€ (1948), โ€œCaravanโ€ (1949), and โ€œI Apologizeโ€ (1951).ย  In 1945, โ€œA Cottage for Saleโ€ and โ€œPrisoner of Loveโ€ each sold a million copies. His discography includes Billy Eckstineโ€™s Imagination (1958), Basie/Eckstine, Inc. (1959), and Billy Eckstine and Quincy Jones at Basin Street East (1961). He also sang a duet with Sarah Vaughan entitled โ€œPassing Strangersโ€ (1957). He appeared in his first film, Skirts Ahoy in 1957.

As musical tastes changed, recording contracts became more difficult for Eckstine to obtain. As a result, from the 1960s through the 1980s Eckstine primarily performed in live shows. He toured all over the country and had a brief role in the 1975 film Letโ€™s Do It Again.

Eckstine married and divorced his first wife June although the dates of the marriage are unclear.ย  In 1953 he married his second wife, model and actress Carol Drake. They had seven children before their 25-year marriage ended in divorce in 1978. After suffering a stroke in 1992, Billy Eckstine died in Pittsburgh on March 8, 1993.

About the Author

Author Profile

Michelle Granshaw is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. She is affiliate faculty with the Global Studies Center, the European Union Center of Excellence/European Studies Center, Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies Program, and Cultural Studies. At Pitt, she teaches in the BA, MFA, and PhD programs and mentors student dramaturgs. Granshaw was honored to receive the University of Pittsburghโ€™s 2021 Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award.

As a cultural historian, her research focuses on disenfranchised, and migrant communities and how they shaped and were influenced by the embodied and imaginative practices within theatre and performance. Her research interests include U.S. theatre, popular entertainment, and performance; performances of race, ethnicity, gender, and class; global and diasporic performance; and historiography.

Granshawโ€™s articles have appeared in Theatre Survey, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Popular Entertainment Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Topics, and the New England Theatre Journal. In 2014, Granshaw was awarded the American Theatre and Drama Society Vera Mowry Roberts Award for Research and Publication for her Theatre Survey (January 2014) article โ€œThe Mysterious Victory of the Newsboys: The Grand Duke Theatreโ€™s 1874 Challenge to the Theatre Licensing Law.โ€ Her book, Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre (University of Iowa Press, 2019) argues that nineteenth-century American variety theatre formed a crucial battleground for anxieties about mobility, immigration, and ethnic community in the United States. It was named a finalist for the 2019 Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Book Award and supported by grants and fellowships including the Hibernian Research Award from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, American Theatre and Drama Society Faculty Travel Award, and Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship. โ€œInventing the Tramp: The Early Tramp Comic on the Variety Stage,โ€ part of Irish on the Moveโ€™sfirst chapter, also won the 2018 Robert A. Schanke Theatre Research Award at the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Currently, she is working on a new monograph titled The Fight for Desegregation: Race, Freedom, and the Theatre After the Civil War. In November 2022, she received an American Society for Theatre Research Research Fellowship in support of the project.

Granshaw currently serves on the Executive Board for the American Theatre and Drama Society (term 2021-5) and co-organizes ATDSโ€™s First Book Bootcamp and Career Conversations series.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Granshaw, M. (2010, October 18). Billy Eckstine (1914-1993). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/eckstine-billy-1914-1993/

Source of the Author's Information:

Paula Conlon, โ€œBilly Eckstine,โ€ in African American National Biography: Volume Four, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Richard Severo, โ€œBilly Eckstine, 78, Band Leader and Velvet-Voiced Singer Dies,โ€ New York Times, 9 March 1993; Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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