Roosevelt High Grad and Israel's Fight for Independence in 1948

Check out this amazing article by Edmon Rodman for the Jewish Journal, published here in Los Angeles about Sam Lewis, a former Boyle Heights resident and graduate of Roosevelt High, who transported war materiel for Israel’s fight for independence in 1948, the commemoration of which is tomorrow on 2 May. 

Here’s the link. 

Executive Order 9066 Photo Exhibit This Sunday

The Boyle Heights Historical Society is proud to sponsor a photo exhibit related to Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 and mandating the forced internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.

The exhibit will be available to view this Sunday, May 7, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the Breed Street Shul at 247 N. Breed St. just south of Cesar Chavez Street.  In addition to street parking near the shul, there is a public parking lot at Cesar Chavez and Chicago streets behind the Bank of America.

For reservations, please email Victoria Torres at arthurtl@aol.com. 

Japanese-American Internment 75th Anniversary Event on February 18

On Saturday, February 18, the Boyle Heights Historical Society is commemorating the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 which ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.  The anniversary of this controversial measure, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, takes on even more meaning in the current political climate. Guest speakers include former California Assembly member George Nakano and Susan Tenorio.

The free event is being held from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. at the Benjamin Franklin branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, 2200 East First Street in Boyle Heights.

For more information and to reserve a spot, please email Victoria Torres at arthurtl@aol.com.

Hadda Brooks Presentation This Saturday!

On the heels of his recent and excellent multi-part post on this blog concerning Boyle Heights-raised pianist and singer Hadda Brooks, Boyle Heights Historical Society Advisory Board member Rudy Martinez will give a talk about Brooks this Saturday.

In celebration of Black History Month, Rudy's presentation will take place from Noon to 3 at the Benjamin Franklin branch of the Los Angeles Public Library at 2200 East First Street.

For more information about this free event, contact Society secretary Victoria Torres at 323.313.2731.

The First Lady of Modern Music: Boyle Heights' Hadda Brooks, Part 4

Introduction:  This concludes the four-part post on pianist/singer Hadda Brooks by Rudy Martinez, a member of the advisory board for the Boyle Heights Historical Society.  Rudy did a great deal of research and put together an interesting and informative history of a significant local musical figure.  We hope you've enjoyed reading this history of a remarkable woman, who was raised and lived for a long time in Boyle Heights.

Having left Modern Records, the Los Angeles-based label she put on the musical map, Hadda Brooks accepted, in late 1950, an offer to host a local weekly 15-minute television show (these were the norm in the early days of the medium) for 26 weeks. Beginning in the fall (the earliest listing found in the Los Angeles Times was on November 19), The Hadda Brooks Show aired live on Sunday nights from 9:15pm – 9:30pm on KLAC (now KCOP) Channel 13. 

Hadda would simply sing a few popular standards and chat between numbers during her time on the air. The show ran for its contractually obligated half a year, but the station might have rebroadcast some of the shows, as it continuously appeared in the Times television listings up to September 6, 1951. 

It should be noted here that Hazel Scott, an African American jazz singer and pianist is rightfully recognized as the first African American to host a television show. The Hazel Scott Show aired during the summer of 1950 in the east coast, but was canceled after two months. This would make the Hadda Brooks Show television’s longest running show hosted by an African American until 1956 when NBC debuted The Nat King Cole Show. 

Hadda Brooks with a group including the legendary singer Frank Sinatra, far right, and actor Red Skelton, far left.  From the Walter L. Gordon Collection, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

The April 1951 issue of Ebony, the monthly African American magazine, published an informative article on Hadda's show, and reported it was re-broadcast in San Francisco as a half-hour show. Unfortunately, no kinescopes or tapes of The Hadda Brooks Show are known to have survived, and beyond the San Francisco reference in the Ebony article, no listings or other references for her show in that area can be found.   

Regarding her recording career, Hadda attempted a last shot at the R&B market in early 1952, when she signed with Columbia's Okeh Records (Okeh was formed in the 1920s as a "race" label marketed towards blacks).  Her first work under the contract was to record an interesting set of songs, such as a version of Johnny Ace's “My Song” and a rollicking, call-and-response number she wrote called “Jump Back Honey,” which ended up being covered by a number of other artists. But with the recordings again failing to make an impact on the charts, Hadda soon left the label. 

She then joined the Harlem Globetrotters during their first European tour in 1952 as part of the half-time entertainment program, giving Hadda the opportunity to perform in front of large and appreciative crowds all across Europe. Among her fondest memories was performing to thousands in a bullring in Spain and having an audience with Pope Pius XII at the Vatican.   Hadda occasionally continued as part of the Harlem Globetrotters entertainment revue for a year or so when they returned to the United States.  

In addition, she continued performing on her own in different venues around the country, including a return to the Apollo Theater in 1953. By this time, Hadda had pretty much stopped swinging, rocking, or ridin' the boogie. Making a final course correction toward jazz and pop, she started specializing in torch songs and romantic standards, increasingly singing to white audiences as she performed mostly in supper clubs and cabarets.  

A newspaper advertisement for the famed Apollo Theatre in Harlem, New York, for the week of October 30 through November 6, 1953.  Hadda had second billing below the great jazz tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons.  From vocalgroupharmony.com.

Surprisingly, she teamed-up with the Biharis again in early 1956 to record two albums as part of their budget line on their new Crown label. One was a collaboration with one of her musical heroes, legendary boogie pianist, Pete Johnson, and the other, released in 1957, was the balled-oriented album, Femme Fatale. Though it's now regarded as one of her best recordings, it was generally neglected by the public when it was released. By late 1956, Hadda left Modern Records for good. On Christmas Day, she married newspaper columnist Dan Brown in Las Vegas before starting a short stint at the Dunes Hotel, but they divorced before the end of 1957. 

The continuous lack of support for Hadda by the Biharis was reflected in a music column in the city's African American newspaper, the Los Angeles Sentinel, on June 6, 1957: 

Hadda has been one of those real good singers who never got that big break. One thing she's lacked is that “push” we've talked so often from record companies. I only came across this album thanks to her hard working hubby, ex-newsman, Don Brown.

 The Sentinel columnist gave Femme Fatale a “Superior Rating.”

In 1957, Hadda’s father, John Hopgood passed away and was buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights next to his mother. At the time, Hadda's mother Goldie, her sister Kathryn, and her own family still lived at the family property in Boyle Heights. 

However, playing to smaller audiences by the late 1950s, Hadda began to spend more time away from Los Angeles. She spent a good part of 1958 touring Europe, and, by 1959, was residing in Hawaii, even performing at its historic 1959 induction ceremony as the 50^th state. But, during most of the 1960s Hadda lived primarily in Australia. She was immediately popular with audiences "down under", as the Los Angeles Sentinel reported on November 10, 1960.  The paper noted that Hadda was already settled in as the nightly house attraction at the 700-seat night club, The Embers, as well as again becoming a mainstay on television, doing five shows per week for GTV-Channel 9 in Melbourne. She continued, however, to make occasional trips back to Los Angeles to visit her family in Boyle Heights and perform at various events such as a local jazz & blues fest in 1965, where she shared the bill with a young Billy Preston. But, by 1969, Hadda was back living and performing in California.

This stunning photo of Hadda appeared in the September 29, 1960 issue of The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne, Australia as promotional material for her GTV-9 television show and appearances at The Embers nightclub.

 In 1971 she teamed with a small indie label called Rob Ray and recorded an album titled, “Hadda,” with the musical arrangements handled by Frank Sinatra’s long-time guitarist, Al Viola. The album, though, was not widely distributed and has never been reissued. But it had not gone entirely unnoticed that Hadda was still singing in top form. In a Times review on December 3, 1971, the late Leonard Feather, one of the country's most esteemed writers on jazz music, covered Hadda's performance at the Purple Lion in Beverly Hills: 

Despite the lack of a rhythm section and propinquity of talkative diners, she was able to weave some sort of a spell with her deep, resonant tones, jazz-rooted phrasing and intelligent choice of ballads. Hadda Brooks is an attractive link to a half-remembered phase in intimate cabaret singing.

Frustrated, however, by a new generation of mostly noisy and inattentive patrons, Hadda stopped performing in 1972 and quietly retired to her Boyle Heights home. By this time, Boyle Heights was no longer as ethnically and racially diverse as when she was an adolescent. By then, the community became predominately a Mexican American neighborhood. But as Hadda, one of the few African Americans remaining in Boyle Heights, commented in the late 1980s, “it's still Boyle Heights to me.” 

In 1987, the Los Angeles City Directory listed her as residing at 3018 Boulder Street, located about a block-and-a-half southwest from the Malabar Street home of her childhood. The Boulder Street home may have also been owned by her family, as well. Though Hadda never had children, she enjoyed the company of her extended family. For example, the August 10, 1972 edition of the Sentinel published a brief article on the celebration of her mother Goldie's 83rd birthday at the Malabar Street home of Hadda's sister Kathryn.  

Though long retired, Hadda received a phone call in 1987 from talent agent Alan Eichler, who recently started to track down and even coax back on stage new clients consisting of “long-forgotten” or retired nightclub chanteuses like Ruth Brown and Anita O' Day. Timing again favored Hadda, as Los Angeles was just then beginning to experience the resurgence of a cabaret scene among a new generation of patrons. Her first gig in sixteen years, at Periono's Restaurant in Beverly Hills, garnered her a rave review in the April 23, 1987 issue of the Times. Hadda was now “unretired” and newly discovered by a younger demographic that kept her busy performing in nightclubs, music festivals and occasional television appearances around the country for years to come.

The cover for Hadda's album, Romance in the Dark. The photo is a still from the film In a Lonely Place (1950), starring Humphrey Bogart, who is second from the left.  Co-star Gloria Grahame is next to Bogart.

It was only a matter of time before new music, films and awards would follow. In February 1993, Hadda was honored at a star-studded Hollywood ceremony with the Pioneer Award, accompanied by a $15,000 grant, by the Washington, D.C.-based Rhythm and Blues Foundation.  The foundation was formed in 1987 as a non-profit artist assistance organization in response to the fact that many pioneering black artists from the early days of R&B and soul never received royalties for the songs they composed and were experiencing financial hardships late in life.  One notable example was B.B. King, who went unpaid for the material he wrote and recorded for Modern Records. Presenting Hadda the award, singer Bonnie Raitt called her “an American treasure.” 

Another career highlight for Hadda came in August 1994 when she participated in a performance and discussion event at the Los Angeles Central Library's Mark Taper Auditorium with another talented R&B singer, Linda Hopkins. Writing about Hadda's portion of the show, the Sentinel reported, “the crowd was ecstatic and gave her repeated standing ovations.”

In 1995, a half-century after she released her first record and now in the digital era of compact discs, Hadda released a new album for the Virgin label titled, Time Was When.  This was followed later that year by the contribution of her original "LA Christmas Blues" on a holiday anthology, Even Santa Gets the Blues. The next year Virgin released That’s My Desire, a 25-track retrospective of her recordings for Modern during the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1996 Hadda celebrated her 80^th birthday at Johnny Depp's Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, performing two full shows. Moreover, she was not entirely done with films. In 1995 came the release of the Sean Penn-directed film, The Crossing Guard, starring Jack Nicholson and which featured Hadda in a brief cameo as (no surprise here) a singing, piano player in a cafe. In the next few years she appeared in small roles in two more movies, The Thirteenth Floor (1999), and John John in the Sky (2001). Hadda was also the subject of the documentary Hadda Brooks: Queen of the Boogie made by filmmakers Austin Young and Barry Pett. The film was screened locally at the 2007 Silver Lake Film Festival, but, as far as can be determined, it has yet to be commercially released or made available on DVD.  

In 1996, feeling her old neighborhood was less safe and perhaps not the best place for an 80-year-old who played late-night gigs, Hadda left Boyle Heights and moved to a large assisted-living apartment in Hollywood on Franklin Avenue (a friend and neighbor was singer Anita O’ Day). In the meantime, with help from her manager, she still performed locally at some of the city’s trendiest nightclubs.  She also gave frequent magazine and television interviews and was an honoree at the LA Pride parade in West Hollywood. Locally, Los Angeles Magazine proclaimed that Hadda had “once again cast her spell on Los Angeles.”  She also transfixed New York City, earning a rave review in the July 2001 Village Voice for an appearance at the noted jazz venue, Joe's Pub.

Hadda on the far right at the 1987 Rhythm and Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards, of which she was a recipient.  Presenter and singer Bonnie Raitt is to Hadda's left and musician Billy Vera is between them in the back.  From Vera's Facebook page.

Meanwhile, the Modern Music Company was essentially one label, the Kent imprint, by the time it ceased operations around 1980. From the time this trailblazing record label released its very first record in 1945 until it went out of business, it had amassed one of largest and most important music catalogs of any label in the post-war era, which included a considerable amount of R&B, blues, doo-wop, soul, and even some early rockabilly classics. 

In 1995, Ace Records, a large European label specializing in reissues, purchased the catalog of Modern Music and all of its subsidiary labels.  Ace even managed to find some of Hadda’s music that was thought to be lost decades ago, such as her heartbreaking rendition of "Why Did You Say We’re Through", which was on the reverse of an old Smokey Hogg acetate.

As well as reissuing much of the Modern Music archives in handsome packaging, which often included generous photos and informative essays on the artists, Ace's arrangements made it possible to pay artists royalties, including to Hadda Brooks. By the late Nineties, Hadda Brooks, the first lady of Modern Music, finally began to receive regular royalty payments for the music she recorded. 

The last nightclub engagement for Hadda Brooks was in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles in September 2002.   Just two months later, on November 21, after undergoing open-heart surgery, Hadda passed away at age 86 at White Memorial Hospital in Boyle Heights.  The hospital is only two miles from the home where she was born and lived for a large part of her life. Hadda was cremated and her ashes were scattered.  

Hadda Brooks' music, however, lives on and, hopefully, generations to come will enjoy a body work that demonstrates that she made a significant contribution to the development and production of a uniquely American music.

To see Hadda on film, check out this link to 10-minute 1948 movie featuring her called Boogie Woogie Blues.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the video, which was uploaded from the Hamon Arts Library of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University.  Enjoy!

https://hamonlibraryblog.org/2016/02/23/gems-from-the-tyler-texas-black-film-collection/.

The First Lady of Modern Music: Boyle Heights' Hadda Brooks, Part 3

Introduction:  Boyle Heights Historical Society Advisory Board member Rudy Martinez is the author of this fascinating multi-part post on pianist/singer Hadda Brooks, who lived in Boyle Heights much of her life.  We pick up the story with Hadda becoming a recognized local performer on the new Modern Music record label.

Hadda Brooks, who was from Boyle Heights, signed to the new Los Angeles-based record label, Modern Records, and her "Swinging the Boogie" was a big regional hit.  The label quickly bestowed Hadda with the modest title, “Hadda Brooks – Queen of the Boogie.” 

An advertisement for Modern Music Distributing Company in 1945 touting Hadda Brooks as "Queen of the Boogie Woogie."  From the website vocalgroupharmony.com.

In quick succession other crowd-pleasing hits followed such as, “Rockin the Boogie,”  “Riding the Boogie,” and “Bully Wully Boggie.” As label chief Jules Bihari later put it, “the first disc was a hit, and we were in the record business.” Right after Hadda's first hit, the Biharis hired a young man named Lester Sill to assist with sales, but he eventually worked his way up to produce many of Hadda's Modern recordings; in 1961 he and music producer Phil Spector would form the Philles Records label.   

In the first two years of Modern Records’ existence, the Biharis recorded a number of other talented artists, but Hadda's output still made up a third of its releases. She was sometimes backed by a small talented trio, and on at least two recordings by the uncredited Count Basie Orchestra. Using her versatility, Modern Music showcased some of her classical training with a standard classical piece recorded for one side and a reworked “boogie version” on the other, such as “Humoresque Boogie.” Over the next few years she would occasionally play on recording sessions by other label artists. For example, Hadda soloed on Texas bluesman Smokey Hogg's seminal blues hit, “(Good Morning) Little Schoolgirl.” 

The 1946 "album" titled Hadda Brooks, Queen of the Boogie and featuring three 78-rpm discs, an unusual format of the time, especially for a black artist.  Photo by Rudy Martinez.

Though she visited a number of clubs, Hadda was never a performing fixture of the Central Avenue scene, which was fine with her father.  She told an interviewer for the Central Avenue Oral History Project:

When I went into show business, my father almost disinherited me. He thought I was working on Central Avenue. My father had a freaking fit. My daddy sort of calmed down and he came to accept what was going on. 

In 1989 she told the New York Times: 

When I first went to Central Avenue, it was really exciting. At that time, I was just getting away from home, and the whole atmosphere excited me. I was able to go see everybody without having to report back home.   

In mid-1946, Modern Music ambitiously issued its first “album” of 78-rpm discs. Simply titled, Hadda Brooks, Queen of the Boogie, it was a collection of three discs inside a flip-through album with her on the cover. The packaging wasn't unique in the record industry, but it was usually only distributed by the majors for established white artists. 

The inside of the gatefold of the Hadda Brooks album.  Photo by Rudy Martinez.

Hadda even made a promotional in-store appearance at the Good Housekeeping Shop in Van Nuys in June 1946. Like her previous releases, the album was a big seller for Modern Music. But, more significantly, the release had the distinction of very possibly making her the first black artist to release an album of 78s before the introduction of the long- playing (LP) format in 1948. 

Around the same time as her album release, Hadda was attending a Lionel Hampton show at the Million Dollar Theater in downtown Los Angeles when he invited her on stage. Though she'd been recording for almost a year, she had not yet performed for a live audience. But playing with full confidence, the young and talented piano-playing sensation was an instant hit.

A week later Hadda was hired to perform in a series of shows with Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra at the same venue, usually playing two obligatory boogie tunes per show. After a matinee show in late 1946, Barnet strongly suggested she sing a song. Hadda replied she wasn't confident about her singing ability, but would give it a try. She rushed over to a tiny rehearsal room the Biharis had down in Little Tokyo to work on a number. During that evening's performance she sang “You Won’t Let Me Go,” and according to Hadda, “the audience went wild!”

Hadda received second billing beneath bop superstar, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, at the New Million Dollar Theatre in Los Angeles, 1947.  From the Austin Young and Barry Pett Collection.

That performance altered the direction of her career. In a short while, the "Queen of the Boogie" transformed into one of the most alluring and unique singers of her time. In early 1947, Hadda recorded her R&B hit and signature song, “That's My Desire.” A few months later, Mercury Records released white crooner Frankie Laine's version of the tune and it shot to number one in the broader pop market charts, making his rendition the more commonly-known today. Nevertheless, by 1947, Hadda was established as one of the most talented new singers around. Later that year, she went on an eight-month cross-country tour with Count Basie and Artie Shaw, which included some east coast dates and a performance at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater.

With her talent, beauty, and air of sophistication, Hadda, was a natural for films and occasional fan-generated publicity. Over the next several years, she made cameos in a number of movies, such as the 10-minute short film, Boogie-Woogie Blues (1947), the all-black feature film musical, The Joint is Jumpin' (1948), Out of the Blue (1946) (with Hadda singing the title song), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) starring Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner, and In a Lonely Place (1948) with Humphrey Bogart.  She got the job in the latter when she was recommended for an audition by her friend Benny Goodman and beat-out Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald!  The cameos all consisted of Hadda performing as a piano-playing lounge singer. In addition, in 1947, Hadda was chosen by readers of the black-owned Los Angeles newspaper, The Sentinel, as one of the “10 Best Dressed Ladies” in the city.

Meanwhile, the grosses from Hadda's popular recordings were still contributing significantly to the growth of Modern Music. In 1947 the Biharis relocated their operation from Little Tokyo to the Hollywood area. Their operations included a new and larger pressing plant, which is believed to have been the first modern, self-sufficient independent record pressing plant in the United States.      

As busy as Hadda was during the late Forties, she continued to maintain her connection to Boyle Heights. She volunteered as the club adviser for a Boyle Heights social and charitable group made up of black women from the area. Called The Social Heighters Club of Boyle Heights, it was formed in October 1947 according to the newspaper, The Sentinel.

Hadda with the famed singer and bandleader Cab Calloway, 1945.  From the Los Angeles Public Library Digital Photograph Collection.

As Hadda evolved from Boogie-Woogie Queen to a primarily sultry R&B singer, the focus of Modern Records also changed. Joe Bihari began making trips to the south to find new artists to record. By 1952 he bought the license to recording masters from Sam Phillips, head of Sun Studios in Memphis (at the time, Sun was strictly a recording facility; they licensed their recordings to record labels.) 

Joe soon had an assistant scout accompanying him on these trips, a 21-year old musician from Mississippi named Ike Turner. In 1953 Joe and Ike recorded a newly-signed little-known blues singer and guitarist named B. B. King for Modern's new RPM label. The song was “Three O’Clock Blues,” and, as a #1 record, it was King’s first breakout hit making him Modern's biggest recording star throughout the decade. The Biharis would continue to find and record such artists as Lowell Fulson and Jesse Belvin, who scored big with his signature hit, “Good Night My Love.” Tragically, Belvin died at the age of 27 in 1960, and is interred at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights.

Hadda Brooks was one of the most prolific recording artists between 1945 – 1949. Modern Music eventually released about sixty of Hadda’s recordings, but she probably recorded over one hundred. Before a second nationwide recording strike hit on New Years Day in 1948, Jules Bihari required Hadda and a few other Modern artists to go into a studio to record a batch of songs every day during the last week of December 1947 so that they could release these during the recording ban. Since the strike lasted less then a year, most of these rushed recordings were never officially issued.

Hadda's newfound musical style ran counter to much of the kind of music the Biharis were recording by the early 1950s. By then, the brothers created several subsidiary labels like RPM, Flair, and Kent to market music that favored an amplified blues sound or a more sax-driven R&B style (the 1953 Chuck Higgins tune, “Boyle Heights,” comes to mind), plus many of the lyrics to the songs were racier or more overtly sexual. 

Hadda on the left with actress Dorothy Dandridge, right, late 1940s.  From the Walter L. Gordon Collection, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

In addition, unlike Hadda’s comfortable middle-class Boyle Heights upbringing, with her genteel-mannered parents and classical music training, many of the new emerging black recording artists had grown-up with experiences of blatant racism and grinding poverty.  Their more robust sound was what the Biharis focused on and this just was not a natural fit for Hadda's music.

Disappointed by the lack of support, Hadda left the now newly-renamed Modern Records Company in 1950. An article in the September 3, 1949 issue of Billboard reported that she sued Modern Records for back royalties, as well as unfair charges against her earnings for disc pressing production. The Biharis countered by declaring all their business practices were within accepted industry standards and approved by the American Federation of Musicians. Modern's in-house accountant also concluded all royalties and fees owed to Hadda had been paid. Nothing else about the lawsuit was published, so its outcome is unknown. 

In 1994, Hadda told the interviewer for the Central Avenue Oral History Project that she never signed a contract, or received formal royalty payments for her compositions – though the label gave her sole credit. She was given a weekly cash “allowance,” that was not always forthcoming on a regular basis and, at times, she had to directly initiate a request for money from the company's finance manager. However, Hadda did describe the Biharis as generous, and she always had money to pay for her expenses. Presumably this financial arraignment immediately stopped when she left the label, even though Modern Records occasionally released recordings from her back catalog long after she left.

The fourth and final post on the remarkable life and career of Hadda Brooks follows her journey from leaving Modern Records, including a stint on early local television, her move to and work in Australia, and her later years, which brought some belated recognition for her many talents.  Check back for the conclusion to Rudy's excellent post.

The First Lady of Modern Music: Boyle Heights' Hadda Brooks, Part 2

Introduction:  Boyle Heights Historical Society Advisory Board member Rudy Martinez is the author of this fascinating multi-part post on pianist/singer Hadda Brooks, who lived in Boyle Heights much of her life.  We pick up the story with Hadda completing her education and embarking on her budding musical career.

Hadda Brooks, who was raised in Boyle Heights, attended Los Angeles Polytechnic High.  After working with a Lincoln Heights-based teacher, Florence Bruni, she found at Poly High another instructor she much admired named Frank L. Anderson, who taught her to play a four-manual organ. Hadda preferred operating the pedals with her bare feet, though she never developed an affinity for the instrument. Nonetheless, she was proficient enough to perform a brief organ solo at her graduation. While in high school, she also joined a girls club called the Kohinoors, of which she was appointed Sergeant at Arms. The club occasionally hosted Sunday afternoon tea dances at the Dunbar Hotel, a famed location for black jazz performers on Central Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles.

A photo of Hadda Brooks from her obituary in the Los Angeles Times, 23 November 2002.

After high school Hadda attended Chapman College, which was then located on Vermont Avenue (the campus relocated to Orange in the 1950s). Dissatisfied with the music curriculum, she left after a year and went across the street to Los Angeles City College. Her stay at LACC was also brief but, apparently, memorable.  

Recalling past events at the college, a columnist in the November 27, 1947 Los Angeles Sentinel, wrote, 

Hattie Hopgood, now Hadda Brooks, was our first lady of swing. Her piano playing was the talk of the campus. Hadda was instrumental in starting the first jam session known as the Green Room jump session. It took the campus by storm.

 Around 1940 Hadda decided to attend Northwestern University in Illinois to study music. However, this college experience was also cut short; after one year, she left, permanently ending her aspirations for higher education. 

In 1941, Hadda attended a Harlem Globetrotters game and met Earl “Shug” Morrison, a member of the famed barnstorming basketball team. After a brief courtship, and despite her parents’ objections (her father didn't believe basketball was a serious occupation for a young man), they were married. The team occasionally attended parties at the home of renowned dance instructor Willie Covan, allowing Hadda to get well-acquainted with Covan and the Harlem Globetrotter's owner, Abe Saperstein. Sadly though, one year after they married, Earl Morrison contracted pneumonia and died suddenly. Hadda was devastated and moved back to her family’s Boyle Heights home.

The graves of Hadda Brooks' grandparents Samuel and Hattie Hopgood, who are buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights.  Photos by Rudy Martinez.

Shortly after her husband's death, Hadda took a job playing the piano at the Covan’s dance studio located at 41^st Street, across from Jefferson High School. Covan was also the tap dance instructor for MGM Studios and Hadda played the piano as he worked with stars like Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Shirley Temple. “The biggest pay I got was about 12 dollars a week,” Hadda later recalled, “and I thought that was like a hundred dollars a day, because I never worked in my life.”

Hadda's recording career with the Modern Music Company began quite unexpectedly in the spring of 1945, but the timing couldn't have been better. With the country entering the postwar years, popular tastes in music were changing from the sounds of the big bands to pop singers and crooners. More significantly, this shift in musical tastes also included the more black-dominated musical forms of jazz, blues, and the nascent sounds of rhythm & blues. 

Hadda not only was one of the key artists in this transition, but was a principle reason for the quick rise of the Modern Music label. Along with the explosive growth of other Los Angeles-based independent labels like Aladdin, Imperial, Specialty, Swing Time, Dolphin's, Combo, and Dootone, this pioneering label would help make Los Angeles the center for the new emerging sounds of West Coast R&B and electric blues, which began the eventual desegregation of American popular music.

Hadda's role in these developments began by a chance meeting. One day she was at a downtown music store looking for sheet music for Franz von Suppe's overture from the light opera, “Poet and Peasant.” When she sat down at a piano and started to briefly play the piece as a boogie-woogie tune, a man approached her and introduced himself as Jules Bihari, and then asked if she could play an entire boogie tune. She said she wasn't sure since it wasn't really the kind of music she regularly played. Bihari explained that he and his two brothers were interested in possibly making records for their jukebox company, and offered her $800 if she could work up an entire tune within a week so he could record it. “If something comes of it, we'll be in business. If not, I've lost 800 dollars,” Hadda recalled him saying.  Hadda said she'd think about it.

This 10 April 1950 aerial photograph shows Malabar Elementary School, which Hadda Brooks attended, at the center and at the far right, next to the dirt lot, was her childhood home.  Found on the Internet Archive website.

In 1944 Saul, Joe, and Jules Bihari, Pennsylvania natives and recent transplants to Los Angeles from Tulsa, Oklahoma, started their jukebox distributorship on San Pedro Street in Little Tokyo. They maintained a string of these devices along bustling Central Avenue in South Los Angeles, which was then a thriving black community. 

But the Biharis had trouble stocking their jukeboxes with the kind of records their customers preferred, which was mostly R&B and blues. There was also a low supply of recording to due to a shortage of shellac which was used to make discs. Then, because of the 1942 – 1944 nationwide recording boycott by the American Federation of Musicians, a number of major labels chose to discontinue their subsidiary labels, which often distributed smaller niche music like “hillbilly music” and “race music.” 

A pivotal moment occurred for the small independent record label scene in Los Angeles in 1944 when a local black army private, Cecil Grant, made a garage-recording of a self-penned ballad titled “I Wonder” for the Bronze Records label. The modest production was a huge hit across the country, primarily with black listeners, who practically overwhelmed the label's tiny pressing plant as it struggled to keep up with the demand. Inspired by this unexpected success, the Biharis decided the only way to deal with the lack of product for their marginally-profitable jukeboxes was to get into the record business themselves. That meant finding someone talented enough to record the kind of music they needed.

A week after meeting Jules Bahiri, Hadda brought him her finished tune, “Swinging the Boogie,” along with a slower song for the B-side, “Just a Little Blusie.” The songs were recorded a few days later, but before the brothers could begin pressing the first 78rpm discs, two crucial marketing ploys had to be completed: first, creating a record label company and second, changing Hattie Hopgood's name to one with more show-biz flair. Thus, in 1945, with one pressing machine in their Little Tokyo storefront, the Modern Music label was created around their maiden recording artist, Hadda Brooks.

The next post picks up the Hadda Brooks story as she becomes a rising star on the local music scene, so check back soon for part three.