Ella Shields

Ella Shields (27 September 1879 – 5 August 1952) was a music hall singer and male-impersonator. Her famous signature song, "Burlington Bertie from Bow", a parody of Vesta Tilley's "Burlington Bertie", written by her manager and first husband, William Hargreaves, was an immediate hit. Though American-born, Shields achieved her greatest success in England. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1879. Her true surname appears to have been Buscher (sometimes spelled Busher). She was educated in South Bend, Indiana. It is not certain when she adopted the stage name Shields. "Ella" might also have been a stage name.
Shields began her career in 1898, doing a vaudeville song-and-dance act with her sisters. In 1904 a talent scout lured her to London, where she was billed as the "Southern Nightingale". In 1906 she married the songwriter William Joseph Hargreaves in Lambeth, London. In 1910 she appeared at the opening night of the London Palladium. It was at this time that she became a male impersonator. The story goes that one night in 1910 Shields was attending a party at which music-hall performers did their acts for one another. Half of a two-man musical act was out sick, and Shields put on trousers to fill in for him. This impromptu turn in trousers proved to be the turning point of her career and she rarely wore dresses on stage again.
==Links to Peel==
Peel chose her most famous song, 'Burlington Bertie' for the Peelenium 1916. No other tracks from the artist seem to have been played by Peel according to available tracklistings on this site. 
He did however feature another song from her repertoire, "Oh! It's A Lovely War", in the Peelenium 1915 - in a later version, recorded by the Debroy Somers Band as part of a medley of World War One songs,
==Shows Played==
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*22 June 1999: Burlington Bertie (Peelenium 1916)
==External Links==
*Wikipedia
*Discogs
Category:Artists