That would have been their first child, Francey; two more arrived soon after — daughter Phyllis (whom some at the DeLisa called “Cornshucks Junior”), then son Chauncey. The children were only rarely seen in public, generally staying with the Cummings family in Ohio, particularly as Cornshucks’ husband joined her on the road as her personal manager. Mildred was already soloing in smaller black clubs around the country when Ruth Brown saw her perform at the Big Track Diner in Norfolk, Virginia.
It was on that same 1943 mini-tour that Ahmet Ertegun recorded Cornshucks in Washington, privately, backed by some visiting musicians from Kansas City, including pianist Johnny Malachi, who later worked with Sarah Vaughan. Results of that amateur recording session, Ertegun regrets, are permanently lost.
“When I first saw her,” he recalled, “she sang pretty much the same sorts of things as Dinah Washington — ‘Kansas City’, for instance — but then she also had that song, ‘So Long’.”
Originally the closing theme for bandleader Russ Morgan’s radio show, “So Long” is a ballad of loss and parting that had in 1940 been turned into a modest Ink Spots-style hit by the Dayton-born Charioteers vocal group. By ’43, they were regulars on Bing Crosby’s radio show, and heroes back home. Cornshucks adopted their song and hushed crowds with it.
Little Miss Cornshucks was not just a name Mildred took to match a costume, but a character role she filled. She’d arrive on stage barefoot, her close-cropped but pigtailed wig topped by a little girl ribbon or a frayed, wide-brimmed Huck Finn straw hat, and wearing that ragged, country girl’s make-do dress — usually bolstered by what a Chicago Defender columnist would term “thirtieth century bloomers.” She’d bring a straw basket with her, place it gently at the side of the stage, and watch it get filled with cash as she sang. Sometimes, multiple observers pointed out, it would take two baskets to hold it all.
Her stage manner was summed up smartly in a 1947 ad for Chicago’s famed Regal Theater: The Dynamic Blues Sensation Little Miss Cornshucks, the Bashful, Barefoot Girl with Blues. She was often described not just as a “blues warbler” but as a top “rustic comedienne,” reporters invoking a term then more associated with Minnie Pearl at the Grand Ole Opry than with any jazz/blues act.
Fan Charles Margerum, who much later on would briefly manage her, says, “It’s not so much that she was clowning, or telling jokes, but she did comic things onstage. You know how Fanny Brice would be ‘Baby Snooks’? Cornshucks did that sort of thing.”
She might dance the latest steps out front of the orchestra and chorus girls. “Bashfully” poking her cheek, she might “accidentally” lift her skirt to reveal a pair of famously great legs. She might even stand there picking her nose, “forgetting” where she was. But from that distracted, unkempt little girl would come this no-joke woman’s voice. Riveted audiences would simply not know what was coming next.
Along with modern blues numbers, she’d mix in old torch songs such as “Time After Time” or “Why Was I Born?”, written by Kern and Hammerstein for a 1929 Broadway show. The latter song came to be associated with singers such as Judy Garland (when she donned her down-and-lonely hobo or street urchin characters), or Carol Burnett (as that lonely late-night cleaning lady). These sentimental, comic personifications reached the global stage, and owed more than a little to the “special audience” Cornshucks original.
If, in the wake of those big-time show business performers, the Little Miss Cornshucks character may seem less fresh now, the act was essentially one-of-a-kind in its era. Black women in vaudeville and clubs, even the comics, had almost always emphasized glamour.
There were other startling connections to those later “mainstream” acts as well. “From the time I first saw her, she sat down on the edge of the stage and sang right to you, all of that, long before Judy Garland did it,” Ruth Brown points out.
Garland would adopt the same stage tactic at her famed concert at the New York Palace theater in 1951, and reprise it in the film A Star Is Born — which, provocatively, also featured her in a Cornshucks-like country street girl outfit dancing along with black kids. (Garland had frequented the very clubs where Mildred appeared in the ’40s, and they eventually shared a number of direct Hollywood ties.)
“Cornshucks’ schtick was trying to get to you,” Margerum recalls. “She could just mesmerize a certain type of crowd.” That type of crowd was most prevalent in northern cities, especially in Chicago, where masses of rural southern Afro-Americans had migrated, searching for work, beyond the reach of segregation by statute.
Many in her urbane, largely black club audience had some far-from-urban memories, whether firsthand or received from parents — memories reawakened by performances of a shy, funny, but vulnerable country woman-child you wanted to protect, who, like Garland or French street heroine Edith Piaf, had somehow been badly hurt.
By 1945, in that town, Little Miss Cornshucks was becoming a star.
Cornshucks was featured at Chicago’s posh Rhumboogie Club, owned by heavyweight champ Joe Louis, where jazz band conductor and arranger Marl Young worked with the likes of T-Bone Walker (on guitar) and Charlie Parker (on sax). When Young moved over to the top-of-the crop Club DeLisa to conduct the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra there, that already familiar haunt became Cornshucks’ regular home base, for years to come.
The DeLisa was nearly as famed in its day as New York’s Cotton Club, but with an audience that, by the ’40s, was more racially integrated. There are photos of everyone from Gene Autry and Louis Armstrong to John Barrymore hanging out there. Since the price of admission was as little as the cost of “set ups” (glasses and ice, maybe with a mixer) and you could choose to bring your own, the sophisticated street really did mingle with the elite — black and white. For many, it was also the sort of place where, as it’s often put, “you could buy anything you wanted.”
In 1945, seasonal themed revues at the DeLisa would run all night, featuring celebrated dancers such as the Step Brothers or Cozy Cole, comics such as George Kirby, and top-line orchestras. One who played behind Cornshucks regularly in the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, keyboardist Sonny Blount, would have the ongoing chance to observe these extravaganzas and Mildred’s character-based headline act closely. He must have learned a lot: He eventually produced more modernist revues of his own and transform himself into the character called Sun Ra.
Cornshucks regularly delivered the rhythm numbers the times demanded; raucous jump blues was king. But it wasn’t everything.
“Mike DeLisa, the club owner, wanted her to do those blues, but we had that slow ballad ‘So Long’ that she did, and I would call the number,” Marl Young remembers. “He’d come rushing up the aisle to say, ‘Don’t do it!’ and I’d just turn my head like I didn’t hear him. When she took that stage, boy — that was it! Everybody stopped and was quiet, listening and looking.”
