"Good Night, Sweet Blues" and the Legacy of Ida Cox: Jazz, Women, and Agency in Route 66 (1961)

How important can a single episode of a major television drama series be to American history? If the year is 1961, and the subject is jazz, then one episode, featuring black characters and black music, can signal a surprising, if still complicated, shift in popular consciousness. "Good Night, Sweet Blues"¹ was a jazz-and-blues-themed episode, aired on October 6, 1961, in the CBS television drama series Route 66 (1960-64). The episode appeared just after Ida Cox had released her comeback album, Blues for Rampart Street (recorded and reported on in the New Yorker in April 1961 and released in late summer), which featured the Coleman Hawkins Quintet. In the television show, the quintet backs the character of Jennie Henderson, played by the singer Ethel Waters. However, instead of replicating the true story of how the album Blues for Rampart Street was produced, the episode inverts the story, suggesting the contortion that black history often undergoes as it makes its way into the mainstream. "Good Night, Sweet Blues" is thus simultaneously progressive and retrograde: granting agency to an African American woman while softening her music and her story. The real singer—Ida Cox—debuted "Wild Women Don't Have the Blues" (1924), for example, as a salvo against respectability politics and as something of a manifesto for women's agency and the exercise of domestic power. But what happens when black history enters television? This reading examines these complications by looking at how the episode, for which Waters was nominated for an Emmy, both reveals and obscures a difficult and tragic history when its story is considered alongside the album.

In the 1950s and '60s there were Dixieland, folk, and blues revivals, all part of a renewed interest in pre-war music. For a variety of reasons, these genres were reintroduced and sometimes appropriated. But in 1961 there was a specific, if miniaturized, revival of the music of the African American blues divas of the 1920s and '30s.² Some of the remaining blues divas of this period, most of whom were born in the 1890s, reemerged and found a modern audience (Weisman: 2005, 134). 1961 was a critical year for this reemergence, as Ida Cox (1896-1967), Alberta Hunter (1895-1984), Victoria Spivey (1906-1976), and Lucille Hegamin (1894-1974) all recorded again in this year for the first time in many years.³

Ethel Waters (1896-1977) was a prominent blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s and thus a contemporary of the aforementioned women. But she was also an actress and had plenty of work in the intervening decades. On Route 66 in 1961 she plays a blues singer quite unlike herself. "Good Night, Sweet Blues" tells the story of Jennie Henderson, a retired and largely forgotten blues singer with a terminal heart condition who seeks to reunite her old band, The Memphis Naturals. As the episode opens, Jennie has a heart attack on a highway outside of Pittsburgh and nearly has a head-on collision with Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) and Buz Murdoch (George Maharis), the protagonists of the series who travel throughout the United States having adventures. They call for an ambulance and the scene shifts to Jennie's house, where an African American doctor is shown conferring with a white cardiologist about Jennie's prognosis. She has had several heart attacks recently and will likely die. After chatting with Tod and Buz, and realizing that Buz is a jazz buff (after asking him to play a particular old record), Jennie reveals her identity (7:51). Tod and Buz had not been aware of her career as a singer, but Buz–who refers to himself as a "jazz hound"–identified the sound of the one of the sidemen, Snooze Mobley, who played on her record. Upon learning that Tod and Buz do not have jobs or responsibilities, and simply drift from place to place (9:20-9:45), she conceives a plan to reunite the far-flung former members of her band one last time.