Three years ago, when nightspot managers around the U.S. were hiring a little-known Negro singer named Billy Eckstine, they tagged him with such labels as "The Sepia Sinatra" and "The Bronze Balladeer" to help lure customers in. Some were lured, and many of them began buying Billy's M-G-M records. By last year, after his Fool that I Am had sold around 200,000, Billy, a big, well-set-up (6 ft., 185 Ibs.) boy with flashing white teeth, had begun to look like a top crooner in his own right.
The mail was pouring in, and the bobby-sox clubs ("The Girls Who Give In When Billy Gives Out") were forming. Two months ago, Billy got the nod from the high lamasery of all crooners, Broadway's huge Paramount Theater, a place sing-sanctified by Sinatra's first big-time appearance there in 1942.
For a few songs, with Duke Ellington behind him, Billy was to get a respectable $2,000 a week. Said his manager last week: "Before that appearance, if the Paramount had offered us an option for next year at $3,000, we would have snapped it up. Now, we don't know how much to ask for him from week to week."
Rich & Rubbery. Almost overnight, "Mr. B." had become one of the hottest singles in show business. The movies and nightclubs wanted him. The Paramount was happy it had signed him early for its Christmas show at only $7,500 a week.
Last week in Manhattan's big new Bop City (TIME, April 25), the fans were giving Mr. B. a reverent greeting in keeping with his shy, devotional manner. The lights went down; a solemn hush spread over the joint. With Charlie Barnet's big brass backing him, Eckstine gave them Somehow, in big, rich tones (he sings open-throated, instead of whispering into a microphone). His version of Ellington's Caravan had the fans hitting the trail (along with more than 1,000,000 record buyers). In his own rubbery phrasing, he stretched Ol' Man River to twice the length of the Mississippi, but the audience ate up every mile of it.
"In the Worst Degree." To Pittsburgh-born Billy, his flaming success at 34 is still a mystery. At St. Paul's Polytechnic Institute in Lawrenceville, Va., he was more interested in baseball and football than singing. Says he: "We thought guys in music were a little on the lavender side." He began to change his mind after winning an amateur-night singing contest in Washington's Howard Theater. By 1939, he had joined Earl ("Father") Hines's big band as a double—singing, and playing "trumpet in the worst degree." Says Billy: "I played fourth trumpet, and I'd have played fifth if Earl hadda had one."
His own band, one of the first to play bop (two of his musicians: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker), ended in failure. He gave it up when a booking agent, "one of those guys with the whip," jumped the band from Los Angeles to Baltimore. From there on, he went it alone.
Eckstine, a modest, soft-spoken man offstage, lives quietly, when autograph hounds let him, with his wife June and his collie "Crooner," in uptown Manhattan. His one recreation is golf. He started playing last year, now often goes direct to the course from his last show at 4 a.m. He is already shooting around 85. One reason: he takes his own professional with him, even on trips.