Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,796

This is the grave of Edith Wilson.

Born in 1896 in Louisville, Edith Goodall stayed in Louisville into her twenties and began to sing publicly, at least by 1919 in local theaters. The early blues singer Lena Wilson started playing in Louisville with her brother Danny. Goodall joined their band and then she and Danny married in 1921. He died in 1928 and she kept his name for the rest of her life.

Danny was the real promoter and musical vision person between he, his wife, and his sister. He worked to convince them to work beyond traditional blues and embrace new and popular versions of music, particularly jazz. Columbia signed Edith in 1921, having her sing with Johnny Dunn’s Jazz Hounds and they recorded 17 tracks. She stayed with Columbia for the next four years, recording a decent amount but certainly less than Bessie Smith or other people better known today. She was supposed to record with Coleman Hawkins in 1924, but he balked at the last minute once he found how little Columbia was going to pay him. She also worked with Fletcher Henderson quite a bit.

Wilson left Columbia in 1925 and after that she worked a lot, but recorded fairly rarely. She was a popular nightclub singer in New York and had steady work and that’s great, but she never really did gain major fame until she was older and did receive fame for some dubious reasons. She did record one side for Brunswick in 1929 and a few songs for Victor in 1930. During these years, she worked a lot with Florence Mills, both in New York and in England, where they were pretty popular and made decent money. She performed with basically everyone from this era–Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Bill Robinson, etc, etc. She frequently performed at the Cotton Club with Ellington’s band in the late 20s. She was all over vaudeville acts and would do just about anything, working with musicians of course, but also in little dramatic bits and a lot of pretty broad comedy.

Wilson also did good enough work as an actress to get quite a bit of radio work and even some movie roles. That included in Amos n’ Andy, which got to one thing about Wilson–she didn’t care about the racial politics of her work so long as she was getting paid. I’m not really criticizing her for this–what was a Black entertainer going to do at this time other than go along with the racist comedy and blackface of the time and film roles as maids and butlers and porters if they wanted to make money? Still, it’s awful rough for the present to see or hear. This would not be the only compromise Wilson would make on this front, not by any means. She had a small role in To Have and Have Not in 1944, the Bogart and Bacall movie directed by Howard Hawks based on the Ernest Hemingway novel. Somehow I have never seen this. Actually, I don’t think I’ve read the novel either. Does anyone over the age of 21 even read Hemingway anymore? Anyway, when Amos n’ Andy went to TV, Wilson did too, playing Kingfish’s girlfriend. She also did a lot of USO shows during World War II, which were strictly segregated, as was the military. But the military took Black troops seriously enough to provide them some entertainment as well. Had to be better than Bob Hope at least.

In 1948, a company came calling for a woman to serve as its spokeswoman. They wanted a bigger Black woman who would in a stereotypical maid costume and talk in a stereotypical way and push syrup. Yep……Edith Wilson became Aunt Jemima. Sigh. Hoo boy, this is a rough one. And I want to be clear, while I am not really going to criticize someone for surviving in their time, 1948 is getting late for this kind of thing and a lot of civil rights leaders strongly criticized Wilson for taking this job. That included the NAACP, which consistently fought against these sorts of stereotypes in the media. So the largest civil rights organization in the country led the criticism of Wilson. If that makes you feel more comfortable criticizing Wilson for this, well, I can see it. It’s certainly an unfortunate legacy, but also one that kept a Black woman paid in a time when opportunities for Black women in the entertainment industry–especially older Black women–were limited.

Wilson didn’t care what the NAACP had to say about it. She was making money and she would stay employed in the role of Aunt Jemima for nearly 20 years. She also wasn’t apolitical or some right-winger Uncle Tom type. Nope, she was executive secretary for the Negro Actors Guild in 1963, an important trade group for Black actors extending back to the 30s. In any case, Quaker Oats finally realized that the world had changed and having an actual Black woman as a stereotype in their commercials wasn’t good business anymore. So the stopped having her do local appearances–evidently a big part of her contract–in 1965 and ended the character in 1966. On these local appearances, she was given the key to the city of Albion, Michigan in 1964. I don’t. know a ton about the circumstances here–Albion is about 30% Black today (the very good band The War and Treaty are from there), but this was the mid 60s in Michigan and the same year that George Wallace was doing awesome with Michigan whites and I am guessing (and to be clear, this is conjecture on my part) that bringing in Aunt Jemima for some event where she was officially honored by the city did not have great politics behind it.

But if you think all of this–whether the controversy or the end of her employment–ended Wilson’s career, well you are wrong. Nope, she had a good revival on the musical circuit in the 70s. She did a comeback show in 1973 with the great Eubie Blake, Little Brother Montgomery, and Terry Waldo. She kept playing too, all the way through the 1980 Newport Jazz Festival.

Wilson died in 1981. She was 84 years old.

Let’s listen to some Wilson, good and bad.

The ad is just white people, as they usually were, but that’s her image on the box.

Edith Wilson is buried in Mount Glenwood Memory Gardens, Glenwood, Illinois. Her grave was unmarked until 2021, when the Killer Blues Headstone Project, seeking to mark the graves of these legends, bought one.

If you would like this series to visit some of the people Wilson worked with, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Fletcher Henderson is in Cuthbert, Georgia (a place you have to want to get to) and Florence Mills is in The Bronx. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.