In honor of the 50th anniversary of singer Sophie Tucker’s death Feb. 9, 1966, the BBC’s William Kremer has put together a mesmerizing trip down memory lane.
After reminding that Tucker ‘smoked so much that a parrot, belonging to one of her friends, would cough every time her name was mentioned,’ he gets around to some of the innumerable examples of the performer’s gumption. Tucker ran away at a young age from her home in Hartford to New York, where she started paying her dues:
A promoter told her she was too fat and ugly to be a singer, but she would do in blackface, so she spent a year and a half touring as a minstrel singer.
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