It’s International Women’s Day this month so this week’s Phantom Dancer feature artist from live 1920s-60s radio is electric guitar pioneer, Mary Osbourne. There’s also a set of women singers from live 1930s-40s radio.

You’ll hear Mary’s guitar with Gay Claridge’s big band broadcasting from Chicago in 1944. You’ll also hear her sing from that same broadcast. Then a couple of commercial jazz sides for you spun by jazz critic Leonard Feather in a 1951 edition of his Voice of America series, ‘Jazz Club USA’.

The Phantom Dancer produced and presented by 1920s-30s singer and actot Greg Poppleton can be heard online from 12:05pm AESDT Tuesday 3 March at https://2ser.com/phantom-dancer/

The last hour is all vinyl.

MARY

Mary Osborne was born into a musical family. Her mother played guitar and her father made violins.

Her earliest instruments were piano, ukulele, violin and banjo. She first played guitar at age nine.

At ten, she was playing banjo in her father’s ragtime band. She also had her own radio program, which she would continue to perform on twice weekly until she was fifteen.

When she was twelve she started her own trio of girls to perform in Bismarck, North Dakota. The music she was playing during this time period was largely “hillbilly”, in which the guitar was simply used to accompany her own vocals.

Aged fifteen, Osborne joined a trio led by pianist Winifred McDonnell, for which she played guitar, double bass, and sang. During this time, she heard Charlie Christian play electric guitar in Al Trent’s band at a stop in Bismarck.

CHARLIE

She was enthralled by his sound, at first mistaking the electric guitar for a saxophone. She said, “What impressed everyone most of all was his sense of time. He had a relaxed, even beat that would sound modern even today.”

Osborne immediately bought her own electric guitar and had a friend build an amplifier.  She sat in with Christian, learning his style of guitar.  Later, McDonnell’s trio got absorbed into Buddy Rogers’s band, after Rogers heard them play in St. Louis. But within a year of the band moving to New York in 1940, the trio broke up and left Rogers’s band, having found husbands. Osborne married trumpeter Ralph Scaffidi, who encouraged her musical career.

PROGRESSIVE

During the 1940s, Osborne sat in on jam sessions on 52nd Street, where she played with some of the biggest names in jazz and quickly made a name for herself.

1941 saw Mary go on the road with jazz violinist Joe Venuti. In 1942 she was working freelance in Chicago when she made a recording with Stuff Smith. In 1944, as you’ll hear on this week’s Phantom Dancer, she sang and played her electric guitar in the Gay Claridge Orchestra. In 1945 Osborne headlined a performance with Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins and Thelonious Monk in Philadelphia, to reviews and audiences that praised her specifically. She, Tatum, and Hawkins went on to record in concert in New Orleans.

Osborne moved back to New York in 1945. There she recorded with Mary Lou Williams in 1945, Coleman Hawkins, Mercer Ellington, and Beryl Booker in 1946, and led her own swing trio. You’ll hear two of these sides played by jazz critic Leonard Feather on this week’s Phantom Dancer.

Her trio lasted from 1945–1948 and played in clubs on 52nd street, had a year-long engagement at Kelly’s Stables, and made several recordings. Throughout the 1950s, she played with Elliot Lawrence’s Quartet on The Jack Sterling Show, a daily morning CBS radio program, and appeared on the television show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.

In this week’s PHANTOM DANCER VIDEO, you’ll see her with a band of jazz greats backing Billie Holiday on an Art Ford Tv show.

The last few years of the decade she spent recording, both with Tyree Glenn and as a leader. Shortly after, Osborne felt that she had been doing the same thing musically for too long and wanted a change. In 1962 she started learning Spanish classical guitar under Alberto Valdez-Blaine. She used classical techniques, such as pick-less playing, in her jazz playing.

BUILDER

In 1968, Osborne moved and settled into Bakersfield, California, where she lived the rest of her life. With her husband, she started the Osborne Guitar Company. She taught music and continued to play jazz locally and in Los Angeles. She played in the Newport and Concord festivals in the early 1970s, and in the Kool Jazz Festival in New York in 1981. In 1989 and 1990, she played at the Los Angeles Classic Jazz Festival, and in 1990 also played at the Playboy Jazz Marathon. In 1991, in what would be her final performances, Osborne returned to The Village Vanguard in New York for a week-long engagement.

Make sure you come back to this blog, Greg Poppleton’s Radio Lounge, every Tuesday, for the newest Phantom Dancer play list and Video of the Week!

3 MARCH PLAY LIST