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Kooskia's Miss Lee had talent and style and ... all that jazz

Joel Mills
Lewiston Morning Tribune
Used with Permission

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At the University of Idaho's International Jazz Collections, recordings of the jazz masters are being restored, including the work of Idaho's own jazz great, Miss Lee Morse, featured in today's story.

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In the early part of the last century, Idaho's small-town children were called to school by a bell.

The children in the Clearwater Valley town of Kooskia had a clarion call of a different sort -- a belle born Lena Corinne Taylor, a waif of a girl who went on to become Miss Lee Morse, one of the most successful singers and recording artists of the 1920s and '30s.

"When I go back up there to visit the folks around Kooskia, there aren't many around who remember Lena," muses nephew Arod Taylor, 67, from his home in Millbrae, Calif.

"But they'd say that when the (Taylor) kids were going to school -- they lived about three miles out of town, up the river -- they'd know it was time to go to school because they'd hear Lena singing, echoing out in the canyon, this great big voice coming out of this tiny little girl."

Morse was born Nov. 30, 1897, in Portland, Ore., to Pleasant John and Olive Taylor, the 10th of 13 children and only the second girl. Music was an integral part of the Taylor family, and in fact brought them to Idaho from Texas in a roundabout way.

"Grandpa (Pleasant) was a preacher back in Texas. He was also a Texas Ranger," says Taylor, son of Glen Taylor, Idaho's original singing senator and Morse's kid brother.

"Grandpa thought that music was a gift that everybody was supposed to share and he wanted singing in the services, and there were some conservative people that said 'Oh no, singing is much too loud, it hurts God's ears ...'

"So they had a falling out and he packed up the wagon and left."

Morse grew up with the music that drove them from Texas to the South Fork of the Clearwater River. Her siblings all could play instruments and were good singers, and Pleasant made sure his choir of children made music with redeeming qualities, according to Taylor.

"The family played a lot of spiritual music. They were mostly the really loud kind, the ones that make you stomp your foot.

"One particularly great one I remember was 'Power in the Blood,' " says Taylor, starting to sing in a rough, but clear voice.

"There is power in the blood of the lamb..."

"Boy, if you got a chorus of that going It was really inspirational; made you want to go do the Lord's work."

Taylor remembers from his father that young Lena and he were close.

"When they were growing up all the other kids had grown and left the farm and they just hung out together, Lena and Dad and (the youngest brother) Paul. They'd go hunting and swim in the river, that sort of thing. They had a bond.

"She was a good shot. They would hunt quail with .22s and she'd just pick the heads off. They'd come home with a gunnysack full of quail breasts."

Lena married Elmer Morse in 1915 and they had a son, Jack, about a year later. But Elmer was what Taylor calls "a hitter" and she soon left, with Jack in tow, for a career in the vaudeville shows of Portland.

"Everybody in the family says that (Elmer) was kind of an asshole. So they weren't too upset about (Lena leaving Elmer)," notes Taylor. "They figured it was either she leave him or grandpa would put him in the ground."

Free from her abusive husband and sporting a new name, Miss Lee Morse rode her talent to rapid stardom.

Known for her incredible range, Morse could sing in the higher registers and was a top-notch yodeler. But she also could sing bass and croon and growl like a man, a skill some attributed to being raised with a pack of boys.

She signed with musical comedy producer Will King in 1920 and sang in musical revues with a variety of troupes over the next several years. By 1923, she was in New York City, singing on Broadway and touring the country. She began her prolific recording career in 1924 with a two-year stint on the Pathe-Perfect label.

There she enjoyed the freedom to record her own compositions, like "An Old-Fashioned Romance" and "Deep Wide Ocean Blues." In 1927, she joined more prominent Columbia Records and quickly became one of the label's most popular artists.

Morse's vaudeville and stage career continued to grow during her Columbia years, and in 1930 she landed a huge role in Florenz Ziegfeld's "Simple Simon," a Rodgers and Hart musical.

The role would have catapulted her to Broadway stardom, but the day before the show's debut she fell ill from a bender and was unable to perform. Another Columbia recording artist, Ruth Etting, stepped in for Morse and the show's hit song, "Ten Cents a Dance," became her signature tune.

This stumble essentially ended Miss Lee Morse's Broadway career. Alcoholism haunted her for the rest of her life. But she still enjoyed many years of recording success at Columbia.

Jim Bedoian, an expert on Morse's life and the owner of Take Two Records, a Los Angeles label that reissues popular music from the '20s and '30s, attributes this continued success to the sheer power of her talent.

"She was a strange character and then she took up with drinking, and God knows how alcoholism affected her personality," says Bedoian from Los Angeles. "But you would never know from listening to any of the recordings that she was anything less than top-notch.

"When she got into the recording studio she really had it. She had magnificent control; a superb recording artist."

Her problems with alcohol and the pressures of show business deeply hurt her personal relationships, especially with her son.

"She was a slave to the bottle," Taylor says. "Basically that colored her relationships with everybody, and Jack was no exception."

Jack's grandson, David Morse, a 23-year-old student at the University of Idaho, describes his grandfather's relationship with his mother as a "family wound."

"Before he was in boarding school, she had a nanny take care of him. She even introduced him as her brother sometimes," he says, to avoid the bias the music industry harbored at the time against artists with children.

"It hurt him. He didn't have the mother he wanted, but I'm sure that he loved her."

"She would go off for long periods and leave (Jack) with somebody or nobody or whatever," Taylor says. "It didn't make for a real tight relationship.

"I think one of the reasons was that he was jealous of her fame, and Dad always said that she was the kind of person who just couldn't handle being successful. It just didn't seem to fit her. She didn't think she deserved it or something."

"There was no question that Lee was a highly emotional person and a very fiery person," Bedoian says. "The Taylors were really a kind of cantankerous, fighting sort of family. Lee inherited that propensity as a family trait and style of interacting, and I'm sure that the drinking must've made it even worse."

Arod Taylor knew the tendency.

"She learned all of the cuss words from the brothers. That was one of the things that people used to note about her is that she could swear like a stevedore, this little tiny gal. A fireball. Don't mess with Lena.

"With that family of boys, she knew how to take care of herself. She could punch your lights out if you needed it. Somebody would make remarks about her or somebody else backstage and she'd deck 'em.

" 'You want a piece of this?' " he says with a laugh. "They'd walk away sadder but wiser."

Morse met pianist Robert Downey in the mid-1920s and he eventually became her accompanist and mate, although it is not clear whether the two ever married. They opened a club in Texas, which they operated until it burned down in 1939. After the fire, they settled in Rochester, N.Y., but Downey ended up leaving her for a dancer, and her alcoholism worsened.

Things improved for Morse when she met Ray Farese. The two were married in 1946 and Farese helped revive her career to a small degree. He was able to get her a radio show in the Rochester area and booked her in local clubs.

The few years they had together were happy by all accounts. She would often travel to Washington, D.C., to visit brother Glen when he was in the Senate.

Arod Taylor remembers these visits fondly. "Every time she'd come to visit she'd bring her guitar and we'd sit around the front room and jam."

"I can remember still, sitting in the front room there in Washington, singing and hearing her voice, and even when I was a kid it would give me goosebumps, especially when she'd sing in the low register. It made my arms crawl."

Morse died in Rochester in 1954 at the age of 57. Almost 50 years after her death and all but forgotten, Morse is today being rediscovered as a major and important talent.

The University of Idaho's International Jazz Collections has reconstructed almost her entire catalog, and has plans to transfer it to CDs so others may more easily enjoy her music.

Kristi O'Connell Myers, 31, of York, Pa., is perhaps Morse's biggest fan. Her Web site, www.leemorse.net, is a rich source of information about Morse, and even has clips of her songs for visitors to listen to. She also is working on a Morse biography.

Myers confesses she has been obsessed with Morse ever since she heard two of her songs, "Old Man Sunshine" and "Moanin' Low," on the collection "The Original Sounds of the 20s," borrowed from her local library when she was 14.

"From her first notes, I was hooked. There was a quality and depth to her voice that the other singers simply didn't have. I have often said that when you listen to a fast Morse number, you can hear through her voice that she is smirking even as she sings.

"She completely inhabited the songs that she sang and in my opinion, no one has ever sold a song or performed with more personality than she."

Miss Lee Morse's obituary in the Dec. 17, 1954, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle read: "At one time she was a top attraction, a leading record seller and a drawing card at clubs and theaters across the land.

"That was back before bop, back beyond the days of swing. They called it jazz then. And jazz was what Lee Morse sang in her low, husky voice with its amazing range and subtle verve."