{"id":36538,"date":"2014-05-27T21:16:58","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T21:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36538"},"modified":"2017-01-10T01:34:17","modified_gmt":"2017-01-10T01:34:17","slug":"herb-jeffries-a-k-a-bronze-buckaroo-of-song-and-screen-dies-at-100-or-so","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36538","title":{"rendered":"Herb Jeffries, a.k.a. \u2018Bronze Buckaroo\u2019 of Song and Screen, Dies at 100 (or So)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Herb Jeffries, a.k.a. \u2018Bronze Buckaroo\u2019 of Song and Screen, Dies at 100 (or So)<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2014-05-26<\/p>\n

William Yardley<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.<\/em><\/p>\n

Herb Jeffries<\/a>, who sang with Duke Ellington<\/a> and starred in early black westerns as a singing cowboy known as \u201cthe Bronze Buckaroo\u201d \u2014 a nickname that evoked his malleable racial identity \u2014 died on Sunday in West Hills, Calif<\/a>. He was believed to be 100.<\/p>\n

The cause was heart failure, said Raymond Strait, a writer who had worked on Mr. Jeffries\u2019s autobiography with him.<\/p>\n

Mr. Jeffries used to say: \u201cI\u2019m a chameleon.\u201d The label applied on many levels.<\/p>\n

Over the course of his century, he changed his name, altered his age, married five women and stretched his vocal range from near falsetto<\/a> to something closer to a Bing Crosby<\/a> baritone<\/a>. He shifted from jazz to country and back again, and from concert stages to movie theaters to television sets and back again…<\/p>\n

…Mr. Ferro also recalled Mr. Jeffries saying: \u201cYou know, I\u2019m colored. I\u2019m just not the color you think I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Jeffries\u2019s racial and ethnic identity was itself something of a performance \u2014 and a moving target. His mother was white, his father more of a mystery. He told some people that his father was African-American, others that he was mixed race and still others that he was Ethiopian or Sicilian.<\/p>\n

In the crude social math of his era, many people told Mr. Jeffries he could have \u201cpassed<\/a>\u201d for white. He told people he chose to be black \u2014 to the extent that a mixed-race person had a choice at the time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cHe told me he had to make this decision about whether he should try to pass as white,\u201d the jazz critic Gary Giddins<\/a> recalled in an interview for this obituary. \u201cHe said: \u2018I just knew that my life would be more interesting as a black guy. If I\u2019d chosen to live my life passing as white, I\u2019d have never been able to sing with Duke Ellington.\u2019 \u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1951, Life <\/em>magazine published an extensive feature on Mr. Jeffries<\/a> that dwelled heavily on his racial heritage.<\/p>\n

\u201cJeffries\u2019s refusal to \u2018pass\u2019 and his somewhat ambiguous facial appearance have let him in for so many cases of prejudice and mistaken identity that he is practically a one-man minority group,\u201d the article said. It described his \u201csmoky blue eyes\u201d and noted that he was frequently mistaken for Mexican, Argentine, Portuguese \u201cand occasionally a Jew,\u201d but that he had chosen to be \u201cwhat he is \u2014 a light-skinned Negro.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Jeffries cited his race as Caucasian on marriage licenses. (All five of his wives were white; his second wife was the stripper Tempest Storm<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Late in life he said that his father, Howard Jeffrey, was actually his stepfather, and that his biological father was Domenico Balentino, a Sicilian who died in World War I<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a 2007 documentary about him, \u201cA Colored Life<\/a>,\u201d Mr. Jeffries said that the name on his birth certificate was Umberto Alejandro Balentino, and that he was born on Sept. 24, 1913, two years later than he had sometimes told people. The documentary included a mock birth certificate bearing that name.<\/p>\n

Firm evidence of Mr. Jeffries\u2019s race and age is hard to come by, but census documents from 1920 described him as \u201cmulatto<\/a>\u201d and listed his father as a black man named Howard Jeffrey. They give his birth year as 1914, which matches what he told Life<\/em> in 1951.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always been the big question, you know \u2014 where do we really come from?\u201d Romi West, one of Mr. Jeffries\u2019s daughters from his first marriage, said in an interview…<\/p>\n

Read the entire obituary here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Herb Jeffries, a.k.a. \u2018Bronze Buckaroo\u2019 of Song and Screen, Dies at 100 (or So) The New York Times 2014-05-26 William Yardley Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. Herb Jeffries, who sang with Duke Ellington and starred in early black westerns as a singing cowboy known as \u201cthe Bronze Buckaroo\u201d \u2014 a nickname that evoked his malleable racial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,1245,8,20],"tags":[17406,17394,17393,17392,1392,2640,2327,17395,14587],"class_list":["post-36538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-biography","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-herb-jeffries","tag-herbert-i-jeffries","tag-herbert-ironton-jeffries","tag-herbert-jeffrey","tag-music","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-umberto-alexander-valentino","tag-william-yardley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36538"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45819,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36538\/revisions\/45819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}