(Photo By Flickr User Tom Lohdan)
Herb Jeffries (born Umberto Alexander Valentino, September 24, 1913 in Detroit, MI), the jazz singer and actor who performed with Duke Ellington and was known as the “Bronze Buckaroo” in a series of all-black 1930s Westerns, died of heart failure Sunday morning at a Los Angeles, CA hospital. He was 100.
According to blackamericaweb.com, his death was confirmed by Raymond Strait, who worked with Jeffries on his not-yet-published autobiography titled “Color of Love.”
With a mellow voice and handsome face, Jeffries became familiar to jazz fans, but segregation in the film industry limited his movie career. He scored a big hit with Ellington as the vocalist on “Flamingo (which went on to sell 14 million copies),” recorded in 1940 and later covered by a white singer, the popular vocalist Tony Martin.
Among the other songs he did with Ellington were “There Shall Be No Night” and “You, You Darlin’.”
Jeffries has been described as the only black singing cowboy star in Hollywood history and, more recently, after the deaths of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and others, as the “last of the singing cowboys.”
Sometimes billed as Herbert Jeffrey, he starred in four Westerns aimed at black audiences from 1937 to 1939: “Harlem on the Prairie,” ”Two-Gun Man From Harlem,” ”The Bronze Buckaroo,” and “Harlem Rides the Range.”
“The Bronze Buckaroo” was recently revived on a DVD release called “Treasures of Black Cinema.”
Jeffries remained active as a singer into his 80s and 90s, touring and putting out the 1995 CD “The Bronze Buckaroo (Rides Again)” and following it up in 2000, with “The Duke and I.” Among the honors that came his way late in life was a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars in 1998, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and being inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, OK (both dedicated in 2004).
Jeffries is survived by his fifth wife, Savannah, three daughters, and two sons.
Actor-Singer Herb Jeffries dead at the age of 100.
