Herb Jeffries (born Umberto Alexander Valentino; September 24, 1913 – May 25, 2014) was an American actor of film and television and popular music and jazz singer-songwriter, known for his baritone voice.
[6] In the 1940s and 1950s Jeffries recorded for a number of labels, including RCA Victor, Exclusive, Coral, Decca, Bethlehem, Columbia, Mercury and Trend.
[13] Firm evidence of Jeffries's race and age is hard to come by, but census documents from 1920 described him as mulatto and listed his father as a black man named Howard Jeffrey.
Jeffries himself, late in life, said that Howard Jeffrey was his stepfather, and his biological father was Domenico Balentino, a Sicilian who died in World War I.
[7] Jeffries once described himself in an interview as "three-eighths Negro", claiming pride in an African-American heritage during a period when many light-skinned black performers were attempting "to pass" as all-white in an effort to broaden their commercial appeal.
In marked contrast, Jeffries used make-up to darken his skin in order to pursue a career in jazz and to be seen as employable by the leading all-black musical ensembles of the day.
Jet reported that Jeffries identified as White and stated his "real" name as "Herbert Jeffrey Ball" on an application in order to marry Tempest Storm in 1959.
[2] Intensely musical from boyhood, he began performing in a local speakeasy, where he caught the attention of Louis Armstrong, who gave the teenager a note of recommendation for Erskine Tate at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago.
[16] He is shown in Black/White & All That Jazz explaining that he was inspired by New Orleans-born musician Louis Armstrong to say falsely, at a job interview in Chicago, that he was "a Creole from Louisiana" when he was of Irish and Sicilian heritage, among other ethnic backgrounds.
[7] During his time with the Duke Ellington Orchestra as a lead vocalist, Jeffries proved his talent as a mature singer, demonstrating his wide vocal range in such songs as "I Don't Know What Kind of Blues I've Got," "The Brownskin Gal," and "Jump for Joy" (all 1941).
[17] He started out his singing career as a lyrical tenor, but, on the advice of Duke Ellington's longtime music arranger, Billy Strayhorn, he lowered his range to mimic the vocal stylings of crooner Bing Crosby.
[3] Touring the Deep South with Hines, Jeffries was struck by the realities of segregation, as the Orchestra's playing was restricted to tobacco warehouses and black-only movie theatres.
Though the silent era had seen a number of films starring only black actors, they had all but disappeared with the economic downturn and the arrival of the talkies, which proved too expensive for many of the "white independents" funding such projects.
Having grown up partly on his grandfather's farm, he had all the requisite horse-riding and roping skills, beside a fine singing voice, but Buell expressed concerns: Jeffries, whose mother was of Irish descent, was "not black enough".
In the 1970s he appeared on episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and (in 1969) Hawaii Five-0 [S1/Ep 17, "The Face of the Dragon" as Jardine] [2] and was heard as the voice of football player "Freight Train" Jackson in the Hanna-Barbera Productions prime-time cartoon series Where's Huddles?.
In 2007, while assembling material for the producers of a documentary film about him (A Colored Life), Jeffries found his birth certificate; this reminded him that he actually was born in 1913 and that he had misrepresented his age after he left home to look for a job.