A child prodigy born in the midst of Black artistic expression in Philadelphia, a leader who never learned to read music, yet excelled at it along the way, she grew up to be a fine swing pianist and nightclub entertainer.
Beryl Booker began her star-filled career as a girl sweeping kitchen floors for quarters while also touring the local amateur circuit as a preschool pianist, winning awards so frequently that rival parents complained to theater managers.
By her teens, she was performing regularly in clubs and theaters, where her big break came in the personage of bassist Slam Stewart. Stewart was one of the most recorded jazz bassists of the 1940s, and although he sworn that he never work with women, he was so impressed by Booker’s playing that he invited her to join his trio.
Beryl Booker would go on to lead various trios from 1952 to 1954, including an engagement at the Embers in 1953 and a tour of Europe in 1954 (occasionally with Billie Holiday), and another tour with Dinah Washington in 1959. The even made a film appearance in the 1947 film, Boy What a Girl!.
Booker’s good friend, journalist Thom Nickels learned that she’d earned acclaim from Nat King Cole, received Christmas cards from Lena Horn, and urged her buddy “Frankie” Sinatra to record “Little Girl Blue” – which he did. Nickels said Booker was a self-made woman who turned racist attitudes on their heads in the Jim Crow South.
“She used to talk to me about traveling through the South when she couldn’t get into certain restaurants with her band,” recalled Nickels. “When Beryl was hungry and wanted a hamburger, she would do anything. So she would say, ‘I’m really an Indian princess; you have to let me in,’ and conned her way into a lot of these no-Blacks-allowed restaurants all throughout the South. She was a trickster. She was a handful. She was highly talented and extremely funny. Sometimes outrageously so.”
Music: The Beryl Booker Trio from 1953 with “Ebony”
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