page_title: Lee Morse
section_title: Music, stage, and film
hierarchical_section_title: Lee Morse / Life and career / Music, stage, and film
caption_attribution_description: English: A publicity portrait of singer and actress Lee Morse (now deseased) from the 1930 film A Million Me's.
context_page_description: Lena Corinne "Lee" Morse was an American jazz and blues singer-songwriter, composer, guitarist, and actress. Morse's greatest popularity was in the 1920s and early 1930s as a torch singer, although her career began around 1917 and continued until her death in 1954.
  Morse was known for her strong, deep singing voice and vocal range, which often belied her petite frame. She possessed a contralto vocal range, and one of her trademarks was her unique style of yodeling. Recording over 200 songs over her career, Morse was one of the most recorded female singers of the 1920s. She was also moderately successful as an actress on the Broadway stage. Her life and career, however, were marred by alcoholism. Morse's' group the Blue Grass Boys had no relation either to their later namesake of Bill Monroe's nor bluegrass music.
  In 2014, Morse's rendition of "If You Want the Rainbow" was used in an episode of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.
context_section_description: In 1924, Morse began her recording career with a contract with the Pathé label. Due to her deep voice, her Pathé and Perfect records were billed as "Miss Lee Morse".  During this era of acoustic recording, the power of her voice was essential to the success of her recordings. Also during this time, she was given the opportunity to record many of her own compositions. Among her notable recordings from this period are "Telling Eyes," "Those Daisy Days," "An Old-Fashioned Romance" (which she re-recorded for Columbia in 1927), "Blue Waltz", "The Shadows on the Wall," "Deep Wide Ocean Blues," "A Little Love," and "Daddy's Girl."
  Pathé gave Morse the opportunity to indulge in a level of experimentation, not only by recording her own songs, but also through the opportunity to explore the limits of her vocal abilities. Prevalent on these early recordings are her characteristic whoops, yips, and yodels. Although dismissed by some as a gimmick, these techniques added a personality to her voice and enabled her to demonstrate her multi-octave range.
  Morse's success as an entertainer took its toll on her personal life. Her husband, Elmer Morse, had created a home for her complete with furnishings he'd built himself. On February 18, 1925 he filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion and abandonment. Although she had deserted her husband and child five years earlier, Morse was able to keep custody of their son Jack. In October 1926, Elmer Morse died of scarlet fever in Spokane, Washington, aged 35.
  In 1927,  with other prominent Pathé and Perfect vocalists (Willard Robison, Annette Hanshaw, Cliff Edwards), Morse moved to the Columbia label. From 1927 to 1932, she was one of the label's most popular female performers, second only to Ruth Etting. She continued to do vaudeville and other stage work, landing a role in Ziegfeld's Simple Simon that may have made her an even bigger star. But her drinking problem left her unable to perform on the show's February 18, 1930 debut. According to Lorenz Hart biographer Gary Marmorstein: "[On opening night], Wynn, the bicycle-piano and Lee Morse made their entrance and were greeted with applause. Everything would have been fine except that Miss Morse had had a few too many and couldn't remember the words or the music." Minus their star, the producers asked Ruth Etting to substitute. As a result, the show's "Ten Cents a Dance" became Etting's signature song while Morse's once promising Broadway career abruptly ended.
  In the mid-1920s, Morse met pianist Bob Downey. He became her accompanist on stage and companion in life, and the two booked international shows together, including a tour of the United Kingdom that concluded with a show at the Piccadilly Theatre in London, England. They lived together as a couple, although whether or not they were married remains questionable. She and Downey opened a small club in Texas that burned down in 1939. They moved to Rochester, New York. Downey left Morse for a striptease dancer. This end to their relationship left Morse devastated and more dependent upon alcohol, which by the 1930s had become a constant companion.
  Although Morse's Broadway prospects had dimmed by the 1930s, she could still be seen in a number of musical film shorts, including A Million Me's (Paramount, April 25, 1930), The Music Racket (Vitaphone, June 30, 1930), and Song Service (Paramount, October 24, 1930).
  She had always preferred stage audiences to small clubs, once commenting "I get nervous! I can't stand it! I want to scream!" Her stage fright was ostensibly linked to her drinking problem that developed during her career. However, as the business changed in the 1930s, she found herself taking club dates when stage gigs grew scarce.
caption: Morse in A Million Me's, the first of three one-reel films she made in 1930
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