Marion Harris (born Mary Ellen Harrison; March 25, 1897 – April 23, 1944) was an American popular singer who was most successful in the late 1910s and the 1920s.
Her parents, James P. Harrison (in the family stove manufacturing business) and Gertrude Kappler Sturtevant (a railroad stenographer) had eloped to marry in Boonville, Indiana in 1893.
[3] Her parents marriage was not to be a long term success - her father's family business fell on hard times, and he was eventually to commit suicide by train in Boonville in 1917, having been reduced to relying on charity.
The dancer Vernon Castle introduced her to the theater community in New York City, where she debuted in the Irving Berlin revue Stop!
She regularly played the Palace Theatre, appeared in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic, and toured the country with vaudeville shows.
[7] After her divorce from a marriage that produced two children, she returned, in 1927, to New York theater, made more recordings with Victor and appeared in an eight-minute Vitaphone short film, Marion Harris: Songbird of Jazz.
Between 1931 and 1933, Harris performed on such NBC radio shows as The Ipana Troubadors and Rudy Vallee's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour.