Helen Morgan

Singer/actress Helen Morgan was an iconic figure of the 1920s, a nightclub performer known for her heart-rending interpretations of torch songs describing romantic devotion to wayward men, which she sang from her perch on top of a piano. Morgan's natural environment was the nightclub, in particular, the '20s speakeasy, but she also made records and appeared in vaudeville, on Broadway, in movies, and on radio. Her most memorable portrayal was that of the doomed mulatto Julie in stage and film productions of the landmark musical Show Boat. In addition, she appeared in four other Broadway shows and nine other Hollywood movies, and her recordings for Brunswick and Victor produced a series of singles that resulted in six American hits.

The facts about Morgan's early life are disputed. According to most biographical sources, she was born Helen Riggins in Danville, IL, on August 2, 1900, to parents who were of French-Canadian origin. Her father died when she was a child, and her mother remarried a man named Morgan; his stepdaughter took his name, becoming Helen Morgan. But in his 1974 biography Helen Morgan: Her Life and Legend, Gilbert Maxwell tells an entirely different story. By his account, Morgan was born in October 1900 in Toronto, Canada, where her mother, Lulu Morgan, was working as a waitress in a railroad yard after being abandoned by her husband, Thomas Morgan, a fireman for the Canadian National Railroad, who was in fact Morgan's biological father. Thomas Morgan, says Maxwell, was an Irishman, and his wife an American of Irish descent who had grown up on a farm in upstate New York. When Morgan was four years old, her parents were reconciled, and the family moved to Danville, IL, but her father deserted again later in her childhood.

Morgan first came to public notice in 1912 when Amy Leslie, a writer for The Chicago Daily News with theatrical connections who had gone to Danville to do a feature story on railroad wives, discovered her in the roundhouse singing a French-Canadian ballad from the cowcatcher of a locomotive and became her manager. Leslie booked Morgan into the French Trocadero nightclub in Montreal where, it is said, she was set up on the top of an upright piano so that everyone in the club could see her. She was also seen by a member of the Gerry Society, which devoted itself to combating child labor in show business, and that was the end of her early career. She and her mother moved to Chicago, where she briefly attended Crane High School in the fall of 1913 before quitting and taking a series of menial jobs over the next several years. Eventually, she was able to return to performing at the Green Mill nightclub in Chicago in 1918. She also entered beauty contests, being named Miss Illinois and then winning the Miss Mount Royal contest at the 1918 Winter Sports Festival in Montreal. The prize for the latter was $1,500, which gave her the wherewithal to move to New York City, where she studied singing with Edward Petri of the Metropolitan Opera School.

Depending on the account, Morgan appeared in the chorus of the 1920 musical Sally on Broadway or during its post-Broadway national tour, or both; since her name does not appear in the credits of the Broadway production, the tour seems more likely