It’s 1929 and you’re looking for a night out in San Francisco. Maybe you’re in the mood for some lively entertainment. You’re in luck! You open the Emanu-El, as this publication was known at the time, and are overjoyed to find that Jewish vaudeville star and torch singer Belle Baker will be in town.
“Miss Baker is returning to the new RKO-Orpheum theater next week, beginning Friday matinee, September 27, in an entirely new act,” we announced.
Belle Baker was a star, and a very Jewish one.
“For fifteen years, since she was graduated to the vaudeville stage from New York’s East Side, Belle Baker has had an increasing series of triumphs until now her name has become established from Coast to Coast as the ‘infinite variety artiste,’” the article proclaimed.
Baker was born around 1895 (the exact year is disputed) in New York City as Belle Becker into a family that arrived amid the great wave of Jewish migration from the Russian empire to the U.S. In 1925, we ran a profile of Baker written by Ray Bril. (Purple prose is not spared.)
“Belle Baker, the actress whose name has become a household word from coast to coast, first saw the light of day in a dingy room in the sordid tenement house at 72 Orchard Street. But for her sweet voice she was no different than hundreds of other Jewish baby girls born that year on the East Side.
“Her lot was destined even to be harder than that of some of the others. For at the age of nine the little girl who was later to bring laughter and cheer to men and women everywhere, had to leave school and go to the factory. For there was a very sick mother at home and a family of eight children.
“But Belle was only able to remain a short time in any particular factory. She would sing at her work and her singing would keep the girls from working so she would lose her job and go to another factory.”
Baker herself put it this way:
“I was just approaching my ninth birthday when one teacher in school one day asked me to bring my mother. ‘But my mother can’t speak English.’ I told her. ‘Then bring me your father,’ she said. ‘My father can’t speak English, either, but I have a big brother who can.’
“I heard my teacher tell my brother, ‘Your sister needs a new dress and a new apron.’ After that nothing could make me go back to school. I was determined to earn money somehow, so that I could have a nice, new, clean dress and apron, and so that my sisters after me could have nice dresses when they went to school.”
Having left school, she began her career at around 14 in Jewish music halls, singing in both Yiddish and English.
“A manager came to the music hall,” Bril wrote. “This time it was a man from the Keith Circuit [a chain of vaudeville theaters]. ‘Would she come and sing for Keith’s at a salary of two hundred dollars a week,’ he asked her as soon as he was able to see her backstage. The girl gasped. Another big moment had come into her life.”
By the time Bril interviewed her, Baker was a star.
“Today when I saw her in her luxurious apartment on 92nd street right off Broadway,” Bril wrote, “I found an exquisitely attired young woman singing a lullaby to a twenty-two-month-old baby.
The child was from Baker’s second marriage, to Maurice Abrahams. And she kept on singing.
In 1926, she starred in a Ziegfeld production of the Rodgers and Hart musical “Betsy,” and she appeared in several Ziegfeld Follies revues. She also debuted a number of Irving Berlin songs, including “Blue Skies,” now considered a classic.
Baker was known for her rich voice and comic timing and was a crossover hit-maker, yet one of Baker’s most famous songs was as Jewish as it gets: “Eli, Eli,” which was written in 1896. (To be clear, this is a different “Eli, Eli” — not the poem-song written by resistance fighter Hannah Szenes in 1942.)
“It was Belle Baker who was the first to sing ‘Eli, Eli’ in vaudeville,” Bril wrote. “Now copies of that song with her picture on the cover grace Jewish homes throughout the country. Into that song she pours all the fervor of her being. She gives it life and body. Her voice brings out all its lights and shadows. It is the daughter of Israel that is singing thus.”
In 1929, we mentioned that “it is seldom audiences will allow her to finish her performance without singing the great Hebrew lament, ‘Eli, Eli,’ which was first introduced to the vaudeville stage by this celebrated delineator of song characterizations.”
Her career carried her through the transition from vaudeville to radio, radio to movies. In 1929, Baker starred in her first film, “Song of Love,” an RKO talkie that played at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco in 1930. Not many of Baker’s screen performances are easy to access, but there are a few clips online that give you a sense of her as a performer.
Baker died in 1957, at the age of 62, in Hollywood. Her New York Times obituary described her as a “torch singer” and “one of vaudeville’s ‘red hot mamas.’”
In our profile, she told Bril what she considered to be the secret of her success.
“It was hard work, very hard work, that brought me to where I am now,” she said. “It is partly to that I attribute my success, and partly to the fact that I have always been true to my folks. Doing the right thing by your people and working hard will get you anywheres.”