Publicity still from 2010 Terry Abrahamson and David Kaplan production "Jazz Funeral for Stella Brooks" or is that actually Stella?

I have been corresponding with Chicag0-based writer Terry Abrahamson about sundry topics not limited to his recently produced tribute to Stella Brooks, which debuted last year at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams theater festival.

Stella was a jazz singer in the 1940s who cut a side with Moe Asch for Folkways (now Smithsonian Folkways, as in it’s in the Smithsonian) and enjoyed a time in the lime light before returning to her native San Francisco for a long, slow, apparently often difficult decline.

When I saw her obituary in the Chronicle, in 2002, which included an appeal for remembrances, I contacted her Stella’s niece Deb Wright in Santa Rosa and was eventually contracted to represent Stella posthumously in terms of working on her legacy. I felt there was something sad about her not being more well-known. Perhaps there is something in Stella’s story that would inspire today’s singers; maybe its a cautionary tale about the fickle and fleeting nature of fame. My basic strategy was to talk up Stella among today’s jazz aficionados; I think there would be a market to reissue her songs along with an updated booklet that tells the rest of her story. There’s something very San Francisco about her.

Eugene Chadbourne wrote a nice entry about her for All Music.

There’s a bit at Bread and Roses website about Stella’s twilight years, at the Jewish Home for the Aged in SF, and meeting Wesla Whitfield.

There used to be a citation linking her to Bobby Short.

She is in the movie about San Francisco’s Hungry I cafe.

Apparently she was the body double for the sculptural bust used in “Sandpiper” the Elizabeth Taylor movie. I picked up a book about the Big Sur artist who created the bust.

Not to take too much credit for such a tiny role — and I admit that is often my weakness, simultaneously denying causality in the zeitgeist but mentioning which random occurences I may have observed if not influenced — but I did put Tennessee Williams expert David Kaplan in touch with Deb Wright at the inception of what became “Jazz Funeral for Stella Brooks” after his research put him across my limited trail.

Kay Kostopolous and I briefly schemed or dreamed of producing a performance piece about Stella — with Kay, of Black Olive Jazz and Stanford theater fame — as Stella. It might utilize her songbook (“I’ll Never Be the Same”, “I’m a Little Piece of Leather”, “Ballin the Jack”) and excerpts from both the SF Chronicle coverage (by socialite reporter Blake Green) and Stella’s letters, which Deb shared with us one afternoon.

There’s also a  letter of endorsement from Woody Guthrie — like Stella, a Folkways act, and apparently her pal — that changed hands among document collectors recently, that puts her work in context, I think.

I was imagining that a collection of Stella’s songs could be used to raise money or awareness for causes of interest to her or her followers, like social services. Maybe it could be a small fund at Bread and Roses or Bill Graham Foundation, for artists needs or health care, or just to lobby for universal care for musicans (or for all of us, for that matter).

I thought of Imperial Teen and Jone Stebbins, another SF legend singer and haircutter (Stella’s post-limelight career). Come to think of it, the lyrics to “Yoo Hoo” could somehow reference, or be sung in tribute, to Stella: “back to Beatnick/ I want partner/A big shot Rock Star”. Stella was sort of the missing link between Billie Holliday and Courtney Love. She yoo hoo’d, surely. Or to paraphrase Tom Robbins, it’s never too late to have a happy afterlife.

edit to add, a New Year, 2012: we also put up this social media page for Stella Brooks:

http://www.myspace.com/stellabrooksjazz