{"id":10086,"date":"2022-04-13T07:53:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-13T11:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theleemsmachine.com\/bean\/?p=10086"},"modified":"2022-04-08T08:58:26","modified_gmt":"2022-04-08T12:58:26","slug":"lavern-baker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theleemsmachine.com\/bean\/blog\/2022\/04\/13\/lavern-baker\/","title":{"rendered":"LaVern Baker"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

LaVern Baker has the strange distinction of being a wildly successful performing artist, the second African American woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, one of the first eight recipients of the Pioneer Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, and, at the same time, unknown to far too many people. Even her Wikipedia entry calls attention to its unfinished state and includes many inaccuracies. I’ve tried to cobble together the story of her life with the most reliable information I could find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born Delores Evans in Chicago, she was the niece of Merline Johnson, who sometimes may have gone by Merline Baker in the clubs where she sang with the Big Bill Broonzy and Blind John Davis as the Ya Yas Girl. Many sources commonly point to another aunt: Memphis Minnie, and give her the name Merline Baker, but of all the aliases that Memphis Minnie went by, Merline was not one of them. It is possible that one errant source long ago decided LaVern Baker’s aunt was Memphis Minnie and simply ran with it, molding information about Merline Johnson to fit the fantasy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lavern’s ‘Jim Dandy.’ Evening star. [volume]<\/em> (Washington, D.C.), 03 Feb. 1957. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers<\/em>. Lib. of Congress.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Mississippi enterprise.<\/em> (Jackson, Miss.), 09 April 1960. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers<\/em>. Lib. of Congress.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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“LaVern Baker” (1997) The Daily Telegraph.  13 Mar 1997, Thu. pg29<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As Delores Evans she sang gospel while growing up, until, at the age of 17, she established her first entertainment persona performing at the club DeLisa under the name Little Miss Sharecropper. As Little Miss Sharecropper, she took inspiration from a contemporary, Little Miss Cornshucks, dressing herself in a tattered cotton sack to evoke the antebellum south for the southerners that were flooding into the Chicago area. During this time she also went by Bea Baker, perhaps imitating her aunt who was said to go by Baker as a back-stage alternative to her on-stage name the Ya Yas Girl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At nineteen, she married Eugene Williams, a postal worker in Cook County. Some time just afterwards she got a gig at the Flame Bar and recorded with the Eddie Penigar Band. Then, in 1952, she adopted LaVern Baker as the name she would use for the rest of her career after joining the Todd Rhodes Orchestra and before touring Europe. Upon her return, she was signed to Atlantic Records in 1954 as their second female artist after Ruth Brown. A year later she would have her first, and one of the biggest, hits of her career: “Tweedle-Dee.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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