Performer Information

As a young jazz singer in Detroit, Herb Jeffries got his start professionally, touring with pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines’ jazz band. While on tour in the South in the late 1930s, he noticed that black children were not allowed admission to white movie theaters. As a result, they didn’t have the movie cowboy role models white children were enjoying. Jeffries, who had  Ethiopian ancestry, loved B-Western movies and saw the need for a cowboy role model for black children, so he became “Bob Blake, The Bronze Buckaroo,” and starred as that silver screen hero in a series of B-Western films, aimed at an audience of black children. He was Hollywood’s only black singing cowboy movie star, making four films in that role (the films are still available on DVD today).
 

 In 1939, he joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra and recorded two major (multi-million selling) “hit” songs, “You, You Darling” and “Flamingo.”  Later, he opened jazz clubs in Paris and Los Angeles and continued to tour with his own band for decades. And in the 90s, the Warner Western record label issued a CD of his Western recordings, drawing, in part, from his early work in B-Western films, with other songs being newly recorded.