Sweet Perennial

Almost eleven years ago in Manhattan's 52nd Street Onyx Club, a tiny (4 ft. 11 in.), handsome Negro girl stepped to the microphone and began to sing. The song she sang that night was one the customers may have heard their mothers hum, but they didn't expect to hear it on Jazz Street. When Maxine Sullivan finished swinging Loch Lomond, the applause almost blew her off the stand and started a national rage for softly swung Scottish ballads that hoisted her pay from $40 a week to $1,000.

Last week (by her estimate, 10,000 Loch Lomonds later), nightclubbers at Manhattan's basement Village Vanguard were still overwhelming her with applause that is now almost homage. In a field where good taste is rare, she has outlived a hundred sensational styles, watched many a vulgar performer flash and flop.

Gigs by Night. Maxine Sullivan was born Marietta Williams in the steel-mill town of Homestead, Pa. There was a phonograph in her barber-father's house and the records she grew up with were mostly those of Blues Singer Bessie Smith, Fletcher Henderson and her favorite, Ethel Waters. She got her start when her Uncle Harry let her sing with his four-piece combination, "The Red Hot Peppers." She was 19 by then, had graduated from high school, had a son and divorced her husband. She worked as a domestic by day and sang "gigs" (one-night stands) with Uncle Harry until 1936. Then Pittsburgh's Benjamin Harrison Literary Club (a gin mill) took her on as a featured singer. For $14 a week and tips Maxine, with just a piano behind her, tried to lift her small, sweet voice above the din made at the bar. A year later she was a hit in New York.

Sounds like Swing. She doesn't think of herself as a swing singer: "It's sort of like Calypso singing. You put the accent on the wrong syllable, so it sounds like swing." Nor will she sing the tunes of the moment. Her own kind of song these days is old favorites like Mollie Malone, If I Had a Ribbon Bow and Darling Nettie Gray, I Never Cried So Much in All My Life (a Gracie Fields tune), and the Caribbean folksong The Insect Song.

Maxine now commands a relatively modest $400 a week, gets comparatively little from the slow but steady sale of recordings and never plays the big, flashy spots. She lives quietly in a modest Bronx house with her semi-invalid mother, her 20-year-old son, who likes serious music (he thinks Maxine's singing is "corny and ordinary") and Paula, 3, a daughter by her third divorced husband. She expects to make her first European tour this summer, is excited by the chance to sing old English tunes in London's Casino.

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