If You Knew Susie .. .

In the tight, smoke-filled cavern of Manhattan's Cafe Society Downtown, hot-jazz addicts often have a cozy feeling that they are spectators at a big-league preview. In his Greenwich Village boogie basement, Proprietor Barney Josephson has introduced (or given a Manhattan-sized helping hand to) such competent performers as the Golden Gate Quartet, Josh ("One Meat Ball") White, Baritone Kenneth Spencer, Georgia ("Her Nibs") Gibbs, Hazel Scott.* Last week it looked as if Barney Josephson had found another.

One warm night this summer Barney ordered the band to fanfare Loch Lomond. A chubby little Alice-in-Wonderland, carrying a pint-sized harp, skipped to the platform and hopped to a high yellow-leathered stool. A white spot picked up a white face, surrounded by carrot hair which fell halfway to the girl's waist. Said she: "This is an Irish harp. With it I will sing you a very tiny song."

With artful casualness she plucked several arpeggios from the gold-shamrocked harp and then sang:

I know where I'm going, I know who's going with me,

I know who I love, but the devil knows

who I'll marry. . . .

The applause lasted longer than the song itself. She followed it with the somewhat bigger Barbara Allen. Then she sang an old Irish song, and a Scotch ballad with a bit of a burr. For her encore she brought out a zither, and broke into the jingling Foggy, Foggy Dew, which another Barney Josephson find, tubby Troubadour Burl Ives, has made a hit.

Pros in the House. This week, after a month of such ballads, more people than Barney were singing the praises of 18-year-old Susie Reed. Hollywood made its first bid for the little (5 ft. 3 1/2 in.) balladeer and was refused: Barney, who is also her manager, shrewdly figures that after a few months' more buildup, Hollywood will be willing to pay more.

Susie's bewitched audiences usually include a handful of Broadway players who hurry downtown from their own shows for her midnight turn, and a contingent of soldiers & sailors, who usually stay for two or three performances and try to buy her drinks. But freckled, green-eyed Susie always refuses. Between shows she generally walks home to nearby Charlton Street for a nap.

Though she sings 20 ballads an evening, she seldom repeats one in a night of performances. Besides the southern Appalachian songs which she learned at singing gatherings in North Carolina, she sings Old English, Irish and Scottish ballads which Susie digs out of the public-library music room. She comes from a ballad-singing family (papa is acting overseas with a camp show), and Susie learned to pluck her harp and zither at home. Her mother is an executive of the American Theater Wing.

Susie's most persistent fans are British seamen, who are seldom content with a standby like Danny Boy, but who bedevil her with requests for obscure English songs. Usually she knows them. The sailormen often ask for, and get, what Susie calls "The one about the girl who feeds her lover poisoned eels."

* For further news of Songstress Scott see PRESS.

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