Belle Baker American singer and actress Date of Birth: 25.12.1893 Country: USA

1. Biography of Bella Baker
2. Early Life and Career
3. Success in the 1920s
4. Broadway and Film Career
5. Personal Life

Biography of Bella Baker

Bella Baker was an American singer and actress, known for her performances in the 1910s and 1920s. She popularized several ragtime and sentimental love songs, including Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" and "My Yiddishe Mama". She performed in the legendary Ziegfeld Follies show and hosted her own radio show in the 1930s. Eddie Cantor, a popular entertainer of the time, referred to her as "Dinah Shore, Patti Page, Peggy Lee, and Judy Garland all in one".

Early Life and Career

Bella Baker, also known as Belle Becker, was born on December 25, 1893 or 1895 in New York City to a Russian-Jewish family. She began performing in vaudeville at the age of 11, where she was discovered by Yiddish Theatre manager Jacob Adler. Later, in vaudeville, her manager was Lew Leslie, whom she eventually married. Baker made her vaudeville debut in Scranton, Pennsylvania at the age of 15. In 1911, she performed at Oscar Hammerstein's Victoria Theater, although her performance was mostly criticized for her song choices. One critic, named Zeitel, took the young performer under his wing, and by the age of 17, she became very popular in New York. One of Baker's first hits was the song "Cohen Owes Me $97".

Success in the 1920s

In the early 1920s, already a well-known ragtime performer, Baker participated in the Baltimore song competition alongside other popular singers. She was the first to record "All Of Me", one of the most frequently recorded songs of that era, and she was also the first person in the United States to host a radio show from a moving train. Some of her most famous songs during this period were "Hard Hearted Hannah", "My Sin", "My Kid", "When the Black Sheep Returns to the Fold", and "I'll Pick Myself a California Rose". As her fame as a vocalist grew, Baker started focusing more on sentimental Jewish songs. In 1925, Sophie Tucker, a fellow vaudeville performer, gave Baker a song to listen to. "My Yiddishe Mama" was incredibly sentimental but became incredibly popular and became Baker's signature song. Other songs in the same category were "My Man", "My Kid", "Baby Your Mother", and "My Sin".

Broadway and Film Career

In 1926, Baker landed the leading role in Florenz Ziegfeld's Broadway production of "Betsy" and performed Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" in the show. The musical comedy, with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart, ran for 39 performances from December 28, 1926, to January 29, 1927. The addition of the song "Blue Skies" to the show was a last-minute decision, but Baker's performance of it left such an impression on the audience that she was called back for encores over twenty times. Baker's film career was short-lived. She entered the film industry just as silent films were giving way to talkies and made her debut in the 1929 sound film "Song of Love", which has survived to this day. Baker sang two songs in the film, both written by her second husband. She appeared in two more films, "Charing Cross Road" (1935) and "Atlantic City" (1944), before ending her relationship with the film industry.

Personal Life

As mentioned earlier, Baker's first husband was her manager and producer, Lew Leslie, whom she married when she was sixteen. They divorced in 1918. In 1919, she married composer Maurice Abrahams, known for songs like "I'm Walking with the Moonbeams (Talking to the Stars)", "Ragtime Cowboy Joe", and "Take Everything But You". They had a son named Herbert Baker. Maurice passed away in 1931, which greatly affected Bella, causing her to almost completely withdraw from performing, including on the radio, for a year. In September 1937, she married Elias H. Sugarman, the editor of the theater magazine "Billboard", and they divorced in 1941. Bella Baker passed away on April 24, 1957, from a heart attack at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. She was buried in the Abraham's family mausoleum in New York.