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233 Jay-Dee Records and Otis Blackwell Joe Davis interest in the young girl singer, Leslie Uggams, dates at least as early as November 1952, when he signed a contract with her manager. By the end of the year his contract with her stipulated a 100.00 payment for each group of four recordings plus 1 cent per record sold. She had been something of a star for a year or so, largely because she won an Apollo Amateur Night competition at Harlem’s most prestigious venue, where so many black artists broke into the music circuit. Indeed, she was the last child on the show as she was remembered as being “so cute, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Dionne Warwick combined couldn’t have beaten her in a contest” (Jack Shiffman, Harlem Heyday [Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984], 109). Support for her ability comes from another biographer of the Apollo shows, Ted Fox, citing the view of songwriter Deborah Chessler, who managed a vocal group, The Orioles, who observed that her “voice just filled the theatre. She knew just what to do with her hands, and how to stand and bow and talk. She was eight years old and more professional than a lot of people were at thirty” (Showtime at the Apollo: The Story of Harlem’s World Famous Theater, rev. ed. [New York: Mill Road Enterprises, 2003], 181). Leslie Uggams Crayne started out at the age of seven with an act arranged by Lucky Millinder. As it happens, it wasn’t Joe Davis who first spotted Leslie Uggams but his wife, Bertha, who noticed the talented youngster after she won an Arthur Godfrey talent show on television. Knowing that her husband was toying with releasing an Easter song about bunnies, she thought the two might link up to record “Easter Bunny Day.” Cowriter of “Easter Bunny Day” Joseph Burns, a former special assistant U.S. attorney, later hit the headlines for his part in the prosecution of the Atlantic City political boss, Enoch “Knocky” Johnson. Chapter Ten Jay-Dee Records and Otis Blackwell 234 As usual Davis wasted no time. A week after signing the contract, he returned to the WOR Studios with Leslie and engineer Bob Doherty, for an afternoon session where she cut four novelty children’s songs. According to the session sheets, she sang “with Orchestral Accompaniment,” actually a five-piece group organized by Fred Norman, who originally wanted veteran Davis session hands like Gil Stevens and Tony Gottusso, but used Frank Signorelli and Alan Hanlon on piano and guitar. Milt Hinton manned the bass (one almost says “of course”), while Shorty Allen hit the vibes and Hank D’Amico played clarinet. They cut “Percy the Pale Faced Polar Bear,” “Ev’ry Little Piggy’s Got a Curly Tail,” “Easter Bunny Day,” and “Palsy Walsy Land.” This brief session launched MGM and Davis into the kiddy record business. Leslie created an instant sensation. The Louisiana Weekly for February 7, 1953, ran a photograph and headline: “MGM Records Hail Sepia Child Star; Being ‘Groomed’ For Pics.” The article pointed out that “Frank Walker, the man who made Bessie and Mamie Smith . . . has done it again by placing a nine-year old Negro child as an MGM recording artist of kiddy records, under the direct supervision of Joe Davis.” The article further stated that she could become a sepia Shirley Temple. “Never before,” it quoted Frank Walker as saying, “has any major recording company recorded a Negro child for Kiddy records and it’s high time something was done about it.” Once again it sounds as if Davis himself wrote the script. In 1953, the New York Sunday News for April 5 stated that as the result of the success of “‘Easter Bunny Day,’ Davis has resurrected several other Burns songs from attic trunks.” Pure Davis publicity. Leslie Uggams worked hard at the start of her significant career leading to the successful “Roots” TV series of the 1980s, which introduced her to an even larger mainstream audience. The daughter of a dancer, whose father sang in the Hall-Johnson choir, and with an aunt who starred in the original stage version of “Porgy and Bess” in New York, she brought a stage pedigree to her career. In the 1990s she appeared in several Broadway shows and in 1997 won an NAACP Image Award nomination for her work on the long-running daytime soap opera, All My Children. Late in 2010 she toured extensively...

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