Canada’s first lady of jazz
‘MASTERFUL’ VOCALIST SANG WITH GREATS, HOSTED OWN TV SHOW
Eleanor Collins, Canada’s first lady of jazz, who broke new ground for female and Black performers as the host of a 1955 variety series, The Eleanor Show, that brought her expressive voice and glamorous stage presence to audiences from Toronto to Yukon, died March 3 at a hospital in Surrey, B.C. She was 104.
Her family announced the death in a statement shared by Christine Hagemoen, a Vancouver writer, but did not give a cause. Collins had continued to live independently in Surrey, with some assistance from family and friends, until a week before her death.
A luminous singer who performed with jazz legends including Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson, Collins spent her entire career in Canada, headlining radio and television shows for the CBC and playing at jazz clubs and concert halls for decades.
She was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2014, praised as “a supremely talented vocalist who changed the face of race relations in mid-20thcentury Vancouver,” and received additional late-in-life recognition at 102, when her face was emblazoned on a postage stamp.
Unlike Peterson, a fellow Canadian who found fame in the United States, Collins had little interest in developing a career south of the border. She “never wanted a suitcase life,” she said, and preferred to stay close to home outside Vancouver, where she raised four children with her husband. Besides, she noted, her parents had made that trip in reverse years earlier — they migrated from Oklahoma to Alberta, joining hundreds of other Black homesteaders fleeing racial violence.
As a result, Collins was scarcely known in the U.S. She was also overlooked at times even in Canada, where jazz “occupied a decidedly marginal place” in popular culture for years, according to Canadian jazz scholar Marian Jago. Hardly any Canada-based jazz artists released commercial albums before the mid-1960s.
“Eleanor Collins, if she was American, would be mentioned in the same breath as Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and Carmen Mcrae and Lena Horne,” Jago said in a phone interview, praising Collins’s phrasing and lyricism. “You hung on the words as she sang them, and you wondered what she was going to do next.”
Through her TV appearances, Jago said, Collins became “an incredible driver for cultural progressiveness” in Canada.
She made her screen debut in 1954, appearing on a three-episode CBC Vancouver series, Bamboula: A Day in the West Indies, that featured Caribbean-tinged music and dancing performed by the first interracial cast on Canadian television. Collins went on to get her own weekly variety show the next year, becoming the first Canadian woman and first Black Canadian entertainer to headline her own nationally broadcast series.
Airing on CBC Television from June to September 1955, The Eleanor Show vaulted Collins into a pantheon of pioneering Black entertainers that included Hazel Scott and Nat King Cole, whose popular primetime variety show began in 1956 on NBC.
Although the series lasted only a few months, Collins remained a staple of the Canadian air waves, appearing on the popular CBC variety series Juliette, which premièred in 1956 and was hosted by a one-time guest on her own show, singer Juliette Cavazzi. She also hosted a 1964 variety series, this time called Eleanor, that reunited her with acclaimed pianist Chris Gage and featured many of the blues, folk, jazz and pop performances that had been a mainstay of The Eleanor Show.
Interviewed by Canadian newspaper columnist Roy Shields, Collins said that being Black on air — at a time when the medium was thoroughly dominated by white men — wasn’t usually a problem. Often, she recalled, a CBC producer “who couldn’t remember all the blonds would say, ‘Get me the Black girl,’” leading to additional work.
Much of the feedback for The Eleanor Show was positive, according to Collins, who told the Province newspaper in 1973 that when she “got so many wonderful funny letters, it wasn’t because I had a great voice, but because people were so pleased to see a different face — one representative of all the people who were never really shown on television.”
Still, she was not immune from racist hostility, especially early in her career. When she and her husband moved into a white neighbourhood in Burnaby in the 1940s, neighbours circulated a petition as part of an unsuccessful campaign to push the family out.
Determined to stay, Collins volunteered at schools and taught music to members of the Girl Scouts, seeking to demonstrate that she and her family were “ordinary people with the same values and concerns,” as she put it in an interview with Vancouver’s Scout magazine.
By the time her television show debuted in 1955, the Vancouver Sun was reporting that “the people of her suburban district respect and like her,” adding that Collins was known “as an ardent community worker, willing to voice her opinion at a PTA meeting or tie on an apron for soup kitchen work.”
“I haven’t had time to be bitter,” she later told the Province, recalling racist taunts she had endured as a child, including from teachers who insisted that Black people were lazy and unmotivated. “We’ve always known that that’s the way some people act. And how can you be bitter when you have children of your own to raise?”
For years, she said, she sought to emulate her mother, who had left school in the fourth grade, supported the family after Collins’s father had a stroke, and encouraged her three daughters to work and believe in themselves. “Be ready for your chance,” she recalled her mother saying, “even if you can’t see your way today.”
The second of three daughters, Elnora Ruth Proctor was born in Edmonton on Nov. 21, 1919. Her father delivered furniture with a horse and cart; after he had a stroke, her mother started a hand-laundry business, with Collins and her sisters pitching in.
Collins got her musical training at church, singing hymns and spirituals, and began performing on the radio after winning a vocal contest at age 15. She moved to the Vancouver area in 1939 and was soon performing on CBC Radio with a gospel group, the Swing Low Quartet, that also featured her older sister, classical pianist Ruby Sneed.
In 1942, she married Richard “Dick” Collins, who worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway and later managed a red cap service for air travellers. He died in 2011. Survivors include four children, nine grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.
Collins performed with her children at times, including in a 1952 concert at Vancouver’s Stanley Park and, after branching into acting, in a Vancouver theatre production of the musical “Finian’s Rainbow.”
After her favourite pianist, Gage, was found dead in his hotel room in 1964 in an apparent suicide, Collins curtailed her jazz career. “I decided I wasn’t too keen on singing anymore,” she told jazz writer Mark Miller. Eventually she resumed regular performances and continued to appear at concerts well into her 90s. About a decade ago, she sang It’s Not Easy Being Green at a Vancouver concert celebrating Black History Month, organized in part by singer Marcus Mosely.
“Within a few seconds of her starting — her delivery, her performance — she had the audience in the palm of her hand,” Mosely recalled in a CBC News interview. “And you knew you were in the presence of a master.”
ELEANOR COLLINS, IF SHE WAS AMERICAN, WOULD BE MENTIONED
IN THE SAME BREATH AS SARAH VAUGHAN AND ELLA FITZGERALD
AND CARMEN MCRAE AND LENA HORNE. YOU HUNG ON THE WORDS AS SHE SANG THEM. — MARIAN JAGO, CANADIAN JAZZ SCHOLAR