Newport News’ other jazz great.
“Frank Brown’s was up on Jefferson Avenue,” says the stylish-looking lady in the black business suit, sipping water in the refined surroundings of London’s Landmark Hotel. “I remember it well.” The interviewer hits the record button on the tape machine. “Oh,” says the woman with the extra-long false eyelashes, reacting. “You are about to hit me with a whammy, huh?” She looks every inch the star among the potted palms and white table linen of the tastefully glitzy hotel. Her grin, revealing pearly white teeth, freely and infectiously dances into a big smile.
“No, no … go right ahead, go right ahead,” she says.
She hovers over her pasta bowl, nibbling, suddenly addressing the tape player. “Nobody messed with you at night in Newport News when I was growing up. Newport News was cool.” In a faintly British accent, the star resumes the remembrance of the hometown nightclub that first let her onto a stage many, many moons ago, illegally.
“I was about 14 … but I always looked older than my age and, of course, I used to dress up and look older, because I couldn’t get in the door if they knew how old I was. I used to sing there at Frank Brown’s. It was a joint. A drinking club with a little trio over in the corner and a bar—piano player, bass player and a drummer.”
You can see from her distinctive face—a prominent chin reminds us that she is reputedly a direct descendent of Crazy Horse, her broad smile a visual heating blanket—that Joan Elizabeth Shaw is an ageless performer. She goes by another name now, a show business name.
That name is a prominent brand in the places where she performs, with both famous and pickup groups: Bangkok, Australia, Israel, Brazil; she’s a household name in the U.K., and especially popular in Japan, where she has recorded almost exclusively for nearly 30 years. Everybody’s Talking about Salena Jones was one of her early Nippon albums, and it remains a true statement everywhere but in her home country—for many across the globe, the singer’s brand of clearly phrased, softly soulful jazz is shorthand for class, sophistication, romance.
Saxophone legend Richie Cole has called Salena “one of the greatest singers alive,” and she’s toured and sung with Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Ray, Tom Jones; been backed by ace sessioneers such as Steve Gadd, Kenny Burrell; was responsible for giving “King” Curtis—a.k.a. Curtis Ousley—his nickname … . In the past six years alone, Salena has released nearly a dozen CDs and played Brazil, the Netherlands, Thailand, Italy and the Middle East. In 2002, she found time to open, and close, her own jazz club in West London, The Salena Jones Jazz Room and Restaurant. That same year, a sold-out concert in Bangkok was broadcast on Thai television. “It was truly a great night with Salena Jones,” reported The Bangkok Post. “[She] held spellbound the 3,000 members of the audience in the main auditorium of the Thailand Cultural Centre, with powerful vocals that crossed an ocean of time.” Salena Jones, or Joan Shaw, if you prefer, the girl who used to catch tadpoles in the ditches near areas of Virginia that “aren’t even there anymore,” has indeed crossed an ocean of time. Many times.
First, she had to sneak away from adoptive parents to realize her dream of singing. “The way houses were on 27th Street—in the back where you had a room and then you had a wash house [below],” she says, thinking back almost 60 years, “I took my daddy’s ladder and put it next to the house and crawled out my back bedroom window and down onto the wash house, and then I’d run down the alley to get to Frank Brown’s.”
Out of breath, adjusting her dress-up clothes, she passed the test. “I used to stand up and imitate Sarah Vaughan, and people would look around for her to see if she was in the room … and it was me.”
She sang in the Baptist church, at the Newport News chapter of Daddy Grace’s empire, but she loved popular music the most. “I used to sing before I could talk—I’d mimic Sarah, I’d mimic Ella, I’d mimic Lefty Frizzell—‘If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time …’—I used to sing everything. I liked all kinds of music, even when I was young. I used to sing things that appealed to me.”
In a few years’ time, Shaw would record an R&B version of Frizzell’s country-fried classic—a brave, early crossover attempt. “Musically speaking, it was very broad there [in Newport News]—a lot of talent. There weren’t many radio stations, but the ones they had were good.”
Ruth Brown and Keely Smith were from across Hampton Roads on the ferry, Pearl Bailey was from across town, and Ella Fitzgerald was born but a block away on 26th Street— “our gardens could have been adjacent.” She never met Ella or the Norfolk gals at the time—and claims Sarah Vaughan as her formative musical inspiration—but she is certainly aware of their shared musical beginnings. And she keeps up with her old haunts, it seems—she’s heard about Christopher Newport University’s new, acoustically perfect music hall [site of CNU’s Ella Fitzgerald Festival]—she floats the idea of performing a “homecoming concert” in Newport News someday.
Even though her ties to Tidewater have long been uprooted to a large suburban English home in West London, and to five-star hotels with traveling trunkloads of stage outfits by her side, the memories seem bittersweet. “I was adopted when I was 8 months old,” she recalls. “My [adoptive] parents loved me to bits, they taught me everything wonderful—they were wonderful people, not just because they loved me so. They were clean, God-fearing and churchgoing. They taught me everything I know about being a woman, being domesticated, being honest.”
But there was uncertainty, too. “My grandmother [Gertrude Shaw], before I was adopted, decided that my mother [Lillian Shaw] was too wild to look after me. She was right, which I’m not ashamed of because there are a lot of single mothers about, you know.
“My mother was young, a singer-dancer, and she wanted to go to New York and I was left in Newport News. My grandmother found out where I was and came and got me from this family and took me to the people [Louise and George Butler] who finally adopted me when my grandmother couldn’t afford to raise me.” She doesn’t talk about her father.
“I wasn’t old enough to hear all of this, I was an infant, but I kept my family name, which is Shaw.”
The Butlers were good people, she maintains, but strict. She recalls one harrowing experience, when she stole a dollar and lied about it to “Mama Lu.” Barely 10, she was beaten from head to toe with a strap—then her wounds were doused with salt water. “I never lied again,” she recalls with certainty. Even so, even the fear of another beating didn’t stop rebellious Joanie from sneaking out to sing on school nights. But after one late-night crawl, Mama Lu was waiting for her when she snuck back in. “She must have come into my room for some reason or another and I wasn’t there. And so I tipped back in and got one foot in the window and I looked over and saw that she was there sitting in my settee. She looked at me and I said, ‘Uh-oh.’”
“Mama Lu asked, ‘Where have you been?’
“‘I been to Frank Brown’s.’
“‘What were you doing at Frank Brown’s?’
“‘I haven’t been with boys or men or anything like that.’
“‘What were you doing?’
“‘I was singing. That’s what I want to do, I’ve been going to sing there a lot of nights. Now, if you want to beat me, beat me. But it’s not going to stop me. It’s what I want to do.’
“She sort of looked at me funny, as if to say, ‘OK.’
“She said, ‘I’ll go up there with you the next time you want to go.’ And so the next time, she and my daddy went with me.” After that, Joan Shaw was soon gone from Virginia. She went forward, but she says she always looked back. “My uncle, my aunt, cousin, my mom—they’re all dead now. It’s just me left now,” she says.
The glamorous older lady with the long, red fingernails has made some hard choices in her life, and today, with a sellout tour of Japan in her immediate future and a premonition that “2007 is going to be my year,” she seems comfortable with them. Mostly comfortable. “Sometimes you look at other people and see that they have big families,” she says. “They have a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters … and there seems to be a closeness there. Sometimes you stop and say, ‘I wish …,’ but then sometimes you say, ‘Maybe not.’
“When I sing, the people are my family. That’s the way I look at it now,” the woman now known worldwide as Salena Jones says, with resignation. “You can’t miss what you never had.”
Following the route of her neighbors Ella and, later, the Five Keys, the youngster caught her big break by winning the New York’s Apollo Theater Amateur Night Contest (as Joan Temple), stopping the show with a powerful rendition of “September Song.”
“When I left Newport News, I was about 15 or 16. I stayed with my mother for a little bit, and then I stayed with my aunt in the Bronx—stayed with her for about six months.” She immediately caught the attention of the MCA Talent Agency. “They were a big company in New York, brought me on board, I soon had a broadcast on WNEW—a radio show called Blues in the Night. At that time, Belafonte was coming up too, Mr. Sexy, we used to call him.”
She began recording 78s as a headliner for the emerging MGM label. Her first disc was 1949’s “He Knows How to Hucklebuck,” with the Paul Williams Orchestra—and she toured and sang throughout the ’50s with everyone from Arthur Prysock to Cab Calloway to Big Maybelle—sharing bills with fellow Newport News natives the Five Keys as well as LaVern Baker and the late, great Johnny Ray. It was during one mid-’50s gig with the latter stars in Chicago that a memorable event took place, a legendary show business tale that wasn’t so amusing at the time, involving jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan, blues singer Billie Holiday and a young Joan Shaw. In jail.
The tale is mostly true, she says, beginning the story. “Well, as you know, I love Sarah Vaughan.”
“She’s your … ”
She interrupts. “Yes. Yes, she is.” Nothing else needs to be said. “I was in Chicago, working at this place, Johnny Ray, LaVern Baker and myself, and Billie Holiday was standing at the end of the bar. Sarah Vaughan came in because she was performing somewhere nearby—it was a groovy place. ‘The Tavern’ was the name.
“At one point, Sarah comes up to me and says, ‘Joanie, what’cha wanna do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. What do you want to do?’ And she said, ‘Let’s go down to the Joint.’
She giggles like a schoolgirl. “So we end up going to this place—it was one of those [laughs] speakeasies, I guess you could say. You needed a password at the door, do you know what I mean? And Billie ended up going to the same joint ….
“Sarah and I went and sat down and started drinking, and someone had gone and told the police that Billie Holiday was in there. And, of course, they knew what that meant [drugs]. Well, anyway, somebody went and got Billie out of there … but they got Sarah and [me] and whoever else was in the place and took us all to jail.”
She laughs. “I remember, I was protesting: ‘I don’t know why you’re taking me to jail—I haven’t done anything.’ But I shouldn’t have been in there. They put Sarah and me in a cell together and gave us a mop and a bucket and told us to clean the cell out. Then the guard came down and said that the only way we were going to get let out was if we sang for them. See, they knew who Sarah was, I don’t know if they knew who I was, [but] they did know I sang.
“So Sarah played piano and I sang, to get out of the jail.”
What did you perform?
“I think it was, ‘Don’t Take Your Love from Me’ …?”
Joan Shaw disappeared more than once from the public eye. In a few years’ time—not long after she released two albums under her real name—she would boldly change her act, her whole persona, say goodbye to her country, transforming herself completely on the Transatlantic journey. “Before I went, the march to Washington had just happened …. Kennedy had just been shot. I looked at myself and said, ‘What am I going to do here—with my career? I’m only one person, what can I do?’ The best thing to do is to go to another world.”
That couldn’t have been an easy thing to do, the interviewer offers. To have a discography of countless recordings and then change your name, your whole act, and move abroad, start over.
“The discography didn’t do anything for me, did it?” she says, her eyes flashing. “OK … it’s like, if you sit down and have a meal, you eat half of it and realize you don’t like it, you order another one. Am I right?”
As if on cue, it’s time for dessert. “Vanilla ice cream only, please,” the star tells our waiter. Salena Jones would prefer to gloss over most details of her early days—“Oh, you are going to make me go back in my head, remembering things, aren’t you?” she purrs sweetly—but that shouldn’t fool anyone.
For Joan Shaw is considered, today, a genuine pioneer of rock ’n’ roll and R&B music—her early recordings on labels like Savoy, Gem and Jaguar, leading revved-up “orchestras” like Paul Williams’, Russ Case’, Luther Henderson’s and Danny Small’s, weren’t big hits, but they showed her undeniable vitality as a creative pre-rock innovator. The fact that, as a bandleader, little Joan Shaw put together and led her own orchestras (the Blues Express, most prominently) for a handful of recordings and several regional tours tells us a little something of her toughness, her will.
She also wrote songs. “I wrote ‘I Cry Myself to Sleep Every Night,’ and I wrote another one, ‘Broken Heart,’ with a guy named Danny Smalls.” But despite some success on the road, and two long-playing albums, in the early ’60s she became restless. “I wanted something better than rhythm and blues,” she says. “I wanted to do something else, and I did.”
She had already been recording demonstration records for artists such as Brenda Lee and Lena Horne. “Do you remember Otis Blackwell [writer of “Great Balls of Fire”]? … I did some for him. I used to hang around the Brill Building.”
Tony Puxley, her longtime manager, has uncovered some interesting recordings of Salena cut during this New York “Brill Building” period. “It’s some stuff he found that he says is ‘wonderful music,’” she says with a tone of disdain. “They were publishers’ demos, for publishers to give to labels looking for songs for artists.”
“That’s how I got here to England. I recorded two or three songs for KPM Music in New York—they sent the songs over here and they couldn’t find a singer who could do them as well as I had. They were interested in me coming here—but I took an interesting route, from New York to London through Spain.” She laughs. “I stayed and worked in Spain for awhile.”
Why Spain? “I went to Fifth Avenue to a travel agency, and I looked at the big map for a long time. I stuck a pin in it three times, and it came up Madrid, Spain. So I bought a one-way ticket to Madrid. I didn’t even give myself an out.” Her travails in Spain are a whole chapter in and of itself. The tale involves a ruthless manager, a loyal club following and a brothel in Calais—where she insists she lived innocently while awaiting her visa to the U.K.
”When I came to England to KPM, from Spain, I wanted to remain Joan Shaw. But at the time, there was a girl called Sandie Shaw, who had a hit called “Puppet on a String”—a lovely looking bird, okay?—and they said the jockeys would be confused by two Shaws.
“And because I loved Sarah so much and adored Lena Horne’s elegance, I put them together as ‘Salena.’ It looked good. And I kept Joan in ‘Jones.’” She chuckles. “I had a lot of chains with J’s on them, I didn’t want to throw them away. Now I just have the S’s turned around. And that’s how Salena Jones was born.”
“This young American, who opened at Ronnie Scott’s club last week, is the most accomplished new singer to be heard in London for perhaps five years,” wrote Derek Jewell in London’s Sunday Times of Salena in April 1968, in one of many rave write-ups. “Her voice is of a sweetness that suggests the young Ella Fitzgerald’s … . Add a Sarah Vaughan-like feeling for the dramatic. That is the picture.”
“Where is my vanilla ice cream?” she asks, looking for our waiter.
Life in London seems to agree with you, the interviewer offers.
“Oh yes, I worked from the moment I got here, little small clubs, whatever. It took awhile. It all started to happen when I hooked up with Harold Davidson—things turned around. They started getting me work [in London]. Ronnie Scott’s came up. It was a little joint then—not like it is now [one of the most famous jazz clubs in the world]—I came in for two weeks and ended up staying for seven. That was the beginning of Salena Jones. I did TV, concerts … . I was a household name in this country.” She pauses, smiles. “People still remember me a little bit.”
In her swinging London phase, she recorded several popular albums, headlined a big tour with Louis Armstrong and appeared on several variety shows, including The Tom Jones Show, Benny Hill, Ready Steady Go! (with the Who), Morecambe and Wise, The Scott Walker Show and more; her favorite televised appearance, though, was on The Dudley Moore and Peter Cook Show. “Oh yes [laughing], Dudley Moore and I were singing “Gloomy Sunday’ and I was behind bars. They were funny, those two. Dudley was lovely. I didn’t know Pete too well. Dudley was a brilliant pianist, you know, and before he got with Pete, he used to be with KPM, and I’m trying to find a demo we did together.”
What song did you perform together?
“Oh dear, I have no idea. I’ve recorded so many songs in my life that I’ve forgotten them all.” She chuckles to herself. “I’ll hear something and say, ‘Oooh, that’s a nice song, I’d like to do that,’ and then Tony or someone will say, ‘Sorry, you’ve already done it.’”
She laughs again. “That should tell you something,” she says.
“I have had a love affair now for over 20 years with Japan,” begins Salena Jones’ open message to her Japanese fans. “It was in 1978 when I very first came there. Over that time I must have visited Japan nearly 50 times, and I have been all over the country—so you might just imagine a little of how much Japan means to me. I have had very many, countless, examples of kindness and generosity at my concerts, shows where so many people, and of all ages, have come to see me and some have cried with my songs and singing. They have come backstage to see me at concert halls and jazz clubs, and I have so many presents and gifts which I keep and cherish. I have been a professional singer all my adult life … and it has not always been easy because of the changing fashion and tastes in music over that time. I have tried to record different kinds of material and music genres, because I like many kinds of music too, and I am very glad that, generally, the Japanese public seems to have liked what I have done.”
In the twilight of her career, the vocalist has become so popular in the Far East that she nearly relocated there a few years ago. “I almost moved to Kobe,” she explains. “But I decided that if I lived there, the Japanese people would no longer think it was special for me to appear, compared with if I visited once or twice a year.” She’s currently preparing the set list for another Far East tour.
It all began with a long-player from 1973 that just won’t quit. “I recorded an album for RCA here called Alone and Together that was big in Japan.” She looks at me in disbelief. “It’s still in issue now—it’s been playing there since—how long, Tony?—since the early ’70s? All these years and they still love it. You walk into little coffeehouses and restaurants and you’ll still hear ‘Everything I Have Is Yours ….’
“I’ve had other artists who wanted me to help them break into the Japanese market [giggles], and I say, ‘No thanks, I’m not going to do that.’ For one thing, the Japanese will buy … but you can’t sell them anything. But they will buy.”
From all recorded evidence, they buy Salena Jones. From award-winning titles such as My Love (recorded with ace N.Y. session players Stuff) to Let It Be (a collection of Beatles covers) to her most recent, These Eyes, Salena’s import selections are plentiful. One of her recorded gems is an album of Antonio Carlos Jobim songs, available on her own independent Vine Gate label. It’s a stunning album of vocal music recorded with Jobim and his family in Rio. “I loved him so,” she says of Jobim. “He used to hate it when I would get onto him about his smoking.” The famed Brazilian composer should have listened, though—he passed away soon after the 1994 sessions for Salena Sings Jobim with the Jobims.
Save certain projects, she discounts most of her studio work. “I’m better live than I am on record,” says the lady from Newport News. Her vanilla ice cream finally arrives, signaling an end to our visit. “When I’m in the studio, I’m singing to a mic, but when I’m onstage, I’m dealing with people, I’m working with their minds.”
What is it about the Japanese in particular? the interviewer asks. What connects them to you? “The way I sing, the way my lyrics are placed when I sing, a blind man can understand,” she says. “Onstage, I’d say I’m quite natural, I’m warm. You can identify with me when I’m onstage working. I paint pictures, pictures that people can see in their minds and feel.”
Want to know more about Virginia-born jazz greats? Click here to read our feature on the full history of jazz in Virginia: meet the artists, read profiles and watch performance videos and interviews.
