Craig Harris is a music historian, a skilled percussionist, and the author or coauthor of several books, including Heartbeat, Warble, and the Electric Powwow: American Indian Music and Crossing Borders: My Journey in Music. He is a former music educator who taught for a quarter of a century and currently plays with Gaea Star Band, with whom he cohosts the weekly Gaea Star Crystal Radio Hour for Dreamvisions 7 Radio Network. His latest book Rise Up!: Indigenous Music in North America was published in November.

Craig Harris explores more than five hundred years of Indigenous history, religion, and cultural evolution in Rise Up! More than powwow drums and wooden flutes, Indigenous music intersects with rock, blues, jazz, folk music, reggae, hip-hop, classical music, and more. Combining deep research with personal stories by nearly four dozen award-winning Indigenous musicians, Harris offers an eye-opening look at the growth of Indigenous music.

In the following excerpt, Craig Harris profiles American musicians Mildred Bailey and her brother Al Rinker.

1 Fingerprints

Jazz vocalist Mildred Bailey was another whose Indigenous heritage was little known. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz called her “the first white singer to absorb and master the jazz-flavored phrasing . . . of her Black contemporaries.”

It had it wrong. Born in Tekoa, Washington, and the sister of Bing Crosby collaborator Al Rinker, the multioctave songstress was half–Coeur d’Alene (her devout Roman Catholic mother, Josephine, was full-blood). Though she moved to Spokane, the state’s second-largest city, when she was thirteen, Bailey often credited the songs she sang as a youngster on the tribe’s Idaho reservation. “It removes the boom from the contralto voice,” she said, “this Indian singing does, because you have to sing a lot of notes to get by, and you’ve got to cover an awful range.”

Bailey’s light soprano vocals, clear articulation, and precise timing influenced Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday, and Frank Sinatra. “[Bailey] struggled with obesity,” said John McDonough of DownBeat, “but she was gifted with a musician’s ear for rhythmic amendment and could produce a sunny, optimistic timbre that shivered with gentle, shimmering vibrato on high notes.”

She was “a much better singer than Billie,” said pianist Teddy Wilson, who played with both.

Bailey and her brothers, Al and Miles, grew up with music. Their father, Charles, played fiddle and called square dances. Their mother played piano.

The Rinker brothers were still in high school when they formed the Musicaladers with nineteen-year-old crooner Harry Lillis “Bing” Crosby in 1923. During the summer of 1925, the group (reduced to a duo) began a five-month engagement at the Clemmer Theater (now the Bing Crosby Theater) in Spokane. Accompanied by Al’s piano, Crosby entertained audiences between films.

Following a stint on KMTR in Bakersfield, California, in the early twenties, Bailey continued to Los Angeles. Visited by her brother and Crosby in October 1925, she introduced them to her contacts, resulting in them being signed to appear in a revue (The Syncopation Idea) for thirteen weeks. The duo’s show-stealing performance led to an invitation to join Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra. Initially struggling to fit in with the orchestra, they hit their stride after pianist and composer Harry Barris joined them. As the Rhythm Boys, they featured in Whiteman’s 1929 biopic, The King of Jazz, singing “Mississippi Mud,” “So the Bluebirds and the Blackbirds Got Together,” “A Bench in the Park,” and “Happy Feet.”

Joining her brother in Whiteman’s Orchestra in 1929, Bailey became the first woman to sing with a jazz big band. She was still new to the group when the Rhythm Boys were fired following Crosby’s automobile accident and DWI arrest. The Rhythm Boys went on to appear nightly at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, with the Gus Arnheim Orchestra. Embarking on a history-making solo career, in January 1931, Crosby recorded his first hit, “I Surrender Dear,” with Arnheim’s band. The Rhythm Boys split shortly afterward. Their only reunion came on the Paul Whiteman Presents radio show on July 4, 1943.

Bailey continued to sing with the Whiteman Orchestra until 1933, the year she married Kenneth “Red Norvo” Norville from Beardstown, Illinois. Initially a stride pianist and vaudeville tap dancer, Norvo had found his niche as a jazz vibraphonist and bandleader.

Affectionately known as the Queen of Swing, the Rockin’ Chair Lady, and Mrs. Swing, Bailey sang with Norvo’s band from 1935 to 1939. Starring on the CBS Radio series Mr. and Mrs. Swing, they topped the charts in 1938, with “Please Be Kind” and Norvo’s “Says My Heart.”

Bailey recorded the stereotype-laden “Wigwammin’,” by Henry Nemo and Irving Mills, on May 2, 1938. “Of course, as a Native American woman, it was a little jarring [to hear] at first,” said her niece, Julia Rinker-Miller, more than seven decades later, “but I think it was just one of those things you had to do. You break down the walls you can, but you also had to play the game.”

The same year, Bailey covered “Rock It for Me.” Written by Alabama twins Kay and Sue Warner, it had been a top-twenty hit for Chick Webb and His Orchestra, featuring seventeen-year-old Ella Fitzgerald, a year before. A portent of things to come, the song included such prophetic lines as “Won’t you satisfy my soul with the rock and roll?”

Billboard wouldn’t use the term for another four years. Disc jockey Alan Freed would popularize it in the 1950s.

When the Norvo group disbanded in 1939, Bailey hooked up with Benny Goodman’s Orchestra for a few months. Recording eight tracks, they topped the charts in March 1940 with “Dam That Dream.”

Although she joined Norvo’s re-formed band in late 1940, Bailey participated in only one recording session before she and the vibraphonist separated. They would divorce but remain friends.

Hosting a CBS radio show, Music ’til Midnight, from 1942 to 1943, Bailey continued to record. Suffering from diabetes, she was hospitalized in 1949. She attempted a comeback a year later but experienced a fatal heart attack in December 1951. She was forty-four.

Bailey was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1989. Five years later the U.S. Post Office issued a twenty-nine-cent stamp in her memory.

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