EMP|SFM Oral History Videos

Category: Jazz

Video Title: Honing Your Craft

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Who: Ernestine Anderson
What: Jazz vocalist
Interviewed: April 25, 1999
Where: Seattle, WA

The Player:
Ernestine Anderson began her career as an R&B singer, but in the 1950s she jumped over to jazz, working with Lionel Hampton. In the mid-50s, Rolf Ericson hired Anderson for a three-month tour of Scandinavia, and in Sweden she ended up recording an album, Hot Cargo, that established her reputation as a jazz vocalist. She continues to perform and record, moving easily between jazz, pop, and the blues. In 2002 Concord Records released I Love Being Here With You, a collection of Anderson's live performances from 1987-1990.

Read the transcript:

Ernestine Anderson:
When I was 16, I announced to my family that, when I'm 18, I'm gonna go on the road with a band. And as luck would have it, the band came through town when I was 18 and I went on the road with the band, you know. I had no way of knowing this at age 16, right, that two years later this would actually happen. And it happened.

I went on the road with the Johnny Otis Big Band for a year, and then I came back home after bumpin' around, you know, going through all the things that one goes through, you know, at these stages of your...I didn't have a career at that time. It was just, you know, tryin' to find myself and as I said, a career, you know, so to speak. Because I knew this was what I wanted to do, [and] in those days that's what you did.

And that's how you honed your craft, by working with a big band and therefore being able to work in front of large audiences, you know, a lot of people at one time. So it's, you know, one step at a time. And that was the first step, is to work with a band and spend some time, on the job training, you know. I guess you would call it apprenticeship kind of thing. There wasn't no classrooms for this then.