AceHistoryDesk – Today in History – The crisis was resolved without bloodshed in March 1833. Henry Clay & John C. Calhoun, who had left the vice presidency at the end of 1832 to serve South Carolina in the Senate, drafted a reduced tariff agreement that pacified South Carolina while allowing the Federal government to stand firm.
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The Last of the Red Hot Mamas
On December 10, 1832, Jackson responded to South Carolina’s recalcitrance with a Proclamation to the people of South Carolina. Considered the greatest state paper of the era, Jackson promised to uphold the federal tariff and warned “disunion by armed force is treason.”
Sophie Tucker was born Sonya Kalish to a Russian-Jewish family on January 13.
The year was either 1884 or 1886. Family legend has it that baby Sonya was born along the road somewhere in Russia or Poland during her family’s flight to the United States. Family legend also explains the name change from Kalish to Abuza during this time: Sophie’s father sought to avoid detection by borrowing the identity of an Italian friend he met along the way. The Abuza family settled in Boston during an era when millions of Eastern Europeans, many of them Jewish, made their way to new homes in America. The immigration station at Ellis Island was opened in 1892 to process the influx of new arrivals, serving as a portal for 12 million people before it closed in 1954.
Sophie Abuza began her career as an entertainer while working as a waitress at her family’s restaurant in Hartford, Connecticut, where the Abuzas had moved when she was young.
Sophie earned good tips for adding songs and humor to the food service. In her teens she attended local shows and also performed in amateur contests with her sister. After finishing school in 1903, Sophie eloped with Louis Tuck, a local delivery driver, but the marriage did not last. Soon after giving birth, Sophie Tuck ran away to New York to become a professional entertainer, leaving her infant son in the care of her mother and younger sister.
In New York, Sophie Tuck became Sophie Tucker. One of her first jobs was at the 125th Street Theater, where her strong contralto voice made her a powerful “Coon Shouter,” a white performer who in the style of the day appeared as a blackfaced minstrel. Although Tucker asked to perform without blackface, she was told that she was “too big and ugly.” Yet, Tucker’s skill as a performer earned her increasingly higher-paying jobs on the vaudeville and burlesque circuits, along with a brief stint in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1909. When one day her costume and makeup were lost in transit, the opportunity for her to perform without blackface presented itself. The audience took to her warmly. As Tucker later wrote in her autobiography, “All the time I was singing five numbers, six, seven, then an eighth, inwardly I was exulting: ‘I don’t need blackface… I’ll never black up again.’”
Sophie Tucker soon became known for both her husky voice and her outspoken comedy. When she first heard her own recorded voice she exclaimed, “My God, I sound like a foghorn!”
But the public loved Tucker’s sound and she became a popular recording artist in an era when recordings were still made on cylinders. In 1911 she recorded her hit song Some of These Days for the Edison Company. Written by African-American composer Sheldon Brooks, the piece became her theme a decade later. By 1914 Sophie Tucker was a major star, touring in the U.S. and abroad. Elaborately costumed, she perfected a bawdy performance style that blended ragtime and jazz, Yiddish popular culture, and sentimental ballads.
Dozens of songs were written specifically for Tucker, especially by her long-time collaborator and lyricist Jack Yellen. Tucker’s My Yiddische Momme (“My Jewish Mother”), penned by Yellen and composer Lew Pollack in 1925, stirred such emotion and pride among European Jews that the Nazis eventually forbade the sale of its recordings.
Throughout her life Sophie Tucker was known to be very generous. She bought lavishly for herself, her family, and friends—her parents, for example, were able to give up their restaurant early in her career. Although more of a cultural than a religiously observant Jew, Tucker espoused the practice of tzedakah (charity), the duty of a Jew to establish justice through compassion. Through benefit concerts she raised money for servicemen during World War I, and years later donated to charity all the proceeds from her fiftieth-anniversary record album and her autobiography. She was also a good business-woman and invested her earnings soundly—in real estate and industry.
Sophie Tucker, “The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas” as she called herself (based on another song by Yellen and composer Milton Ager), continued to perform on stage and radio, in movies, on recordings, and later on television into her eightieth year.
She married and divorced three times and counted her friends in the thousands. Tucker died on February 9, 1966, having lived through several major eras of the entertainment business. Her 1911 recording of Some of These Days was added to the National Recording Registry in 2004. The legacy of Sophie Tucker’s frank and brassy style continues to emerge in the work of later generations, such as the contemporary women performers Bette Midler and Roseanne Barr.“
- Sophie Tucker, Some of These Days: The Autobiography of Sophie Tucker (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1945), p. 63. (Return to text)
- Tucker, Some of These Days, p. 99. (Return to text)
Learn More
- Today in History includes features on a number of twentieth-century entertainers such as Sophie Tucker and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. Search Today in History on the term entertainer or singer to learn about others. Read, for example, about Mahalia Jackson who was born in 1911, the year Sophie Tucker recorded her theme song Some of These Days for the Edison Company.
- View the presentation on the documentary Making Trouble which demonstrates the indelible impact American Jewish women comedians have made on the entertainment world and the times in which they lived. Sophie Tucker is among those highlighted.
- Two collections digitized in collaboration with the Library of Congress, Historic American Sheet Music and African-American Sheet Music, include the sheet music of songs from vaudeville, musicals, and “Tin Pan Alley.” Search on terms such as Sophie Tucker, Shubert Gaieties, and Ziegfeld Follies to see tunes such as The Darktown Strutters’ Balland When I Hear a Syncopated Tune. Also search on the term Jack Yellen to see works by the lyricist who developed Tucker’s great hit My Yiddische Momme. Be aware that these primary historical documents reflect the negative stereotypes of a different era and may contain offensive materials.
- Browse or search the Performing Arts Databases for more on sheet music, ragtime, jazz, Sophie Tucker, and the lyricists and composers who worked with her.
- In 1906 the New York recording plant of Edison’s National Phonograph Company was located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixteenth Street. Learn more about the plant, and both the cylinder and discs phonograph industry in the special presentation History of Edison Sound Recordings. Read, for example, the History of the Cylinder Phonograph, and hear tunes such as Crazy Blues, performed by Noble Sissle.
- Search on the terms Hartford, Connecticut to see images of Sophie Tucker’s home town.
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