Herb Jeffries, who sang with Duke Ellington
and starred in early black westerns as a singing cowboy known as “the
Bronze Buckaroo” — a nickname that evoked his malleable racial identity —
died on Sunday in West Hills, Calif. He was believed to be 100.
The cause was heart failure, said Raymond Strait, a writer who had worked on Mr. Jeffries’s autobiography with him.
Mr. Jeffries used to say: “I’m a chameleon.” The label applied on many levels.
Over
the course of his century, he changed his name, altered his age,
married five women and stretched his vocal range from near falsetto to
something closer to a Bing Crosby baritone. He shifted from jazz to
country and back again, and from concert stages to movie theaters to
television sets and back again.
He sang with Earl Hines and his orchestra in the early 1930s. He starred in “Harlem on the Prairie,”
a black western released in 1937, and its several sequels. By 1940, he
was singing with the Ellington orchestra and soon had a hit single, “Flamingo,”
released in 1941, which sold more than 14 million copies. (His name had
been Herbert Jeffrey, but the credits on the record mistakenly called
him Jeffries, so he renamed himself to match the typo.)
Mr.
Jeffries’s racial and ethnic identity was itself something of a
performance — and a moving target. His mother was white, his father more
of a mystery. He told some people that his father was African-American,
others that he was mixed race and still others that he was Ethiopian or
Sicilian.
In
the crude social math of his era, many people told Mr. Jeffries he
could have “passed” for white. He told people he chose to be black — to
the extent that a mixed-race person had a choice at the time.
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