SYMHC Classics: Moms Mabley

This 2022 episode covers Moms Mabley, whose career lasted more than six decades. She was hugely influential, and inspired so many comedians and other performers who came after her. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. Coming up this week, we have an episode on somebody who is going to get a name drop in today's classic. We will leave that upcoming episode, who it's about, as a surprise, but today's classic is on Moms Mabley.

• 2:23Holly Frey?

  This originally came out on February 9th, 2022. Enjoy.

• 2:31Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:45Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  I really enjoy the TV show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. If you are not familiar with this show, it is about a Jewish woman named Midge Maisel, who tries to build a career as a comedian, starting at the end of the 1950s. There are various performers who appear as characters on this show. Some of them have real world inspirations, but they're fictional characters. And there are other ones like Lenny Bruce, who are fictionalized representations of a real person. In an episode from the show's third season, Mrs. Maisel performs at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and ahead of her onstage is Moms Mabley,

• 3:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  who is played wonderfully by Wanda Sykes. If my own age and background were a little different, or maybe if I had grown up watching reruns of old variety shows, I would have already known who this was. But I did not, so I did what I always do when a new performer shows up on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and I Googled. So Moms Mabley, yes, was a real person. But I had some doubts about being able to do this episode, because her career lasted more than six decades. She was hugely influential. She inspired so many comedians and other performers who came after her. She's really one of the founders of stand-up

• 4:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  comedy in the United States. But outside of her work, a lot of the details of her life are kind of a mystery. And there are some contradictory accounts of a particularly traumatic part of her early life. Heads up that talking about those contradictions is that's going to involve some discussion of rape and other trauma. And I also think if I were part of an adoption triad, there's some part of this that I would probably also find particularly troubling.

• 4:38Holly Frey?

  Moms Mabley was born Loretta Mary Akin on March 19th, probably 1897. In the 1900s census, her age is given as three. But in the earliest years of her career, when people might have thought she was too young to be out on her own, she gave her birth year as 1894. Later in her life, she was not forthcoming about her age at all. And to add another layer of confusion, her grave marker lists her date of birth as March 19th, 1899.

• 5:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Loretta's parents were James and Mary Magdalene Smith Akin. James, who was known as Jim, was the son of Jane Akin Hall, and his father was her enslaver. Jim was born in 1861, and normally that would have meant he was considered enslaved from his birth. But it seems that his father considered him to be free. According to Moms Mabley's later accounts, his mother made a particular point of telling both him and Loretta that they had been born free. Loretta also had a great grandmother, Harriet Smith, who she described as Cherokee, who was a big part of her early life and a big influence on her.

• 5:50Holly Frey?

  The family lived in Brevard, North Carolina, which is southwest of Asheville, on the edge of what is now Pisgah National Forest. In 1900, it had a population of under 600 people. It is easy to imagine that a black family in a small town in the North Carolina mountains in the early 20th century was living in severe poverty. And a lot of current descriptions of Moms Mabley's imply that her early childhood was one of extreme hardship and that she fled Brevard and never looked back. But in interviews later in her life, Mabley talked about western North Carolina with just enormous fondness.

• 6:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Studs Terkel recorded an oral history with her in 1961, and she did joke that you had to take a buggy from Asheville to get to Brevard, but she also called it "one of the greatest and healthiest places on earth." She spoke of her grandmother and her great-grandmother with deep, deep love and respect. Interviews that other people gave after her death also described her making frequent visits home and maintaining her connection to the North Carolina mountains.

• 6:57Holly Frey?

  She also described her father, Jim Aiken, as a great man. He was a successful businessman who had started out selling gingerbread and cider and worked his way up to owning a store, along with a bakery/cafe and a barber shop that catered to white customers. He also ran a dray service, which carried both passengers and freight, along with carrying the mail into and out of town.

• 7:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although Mabley's oral testimony describes Brevard as not being segregated, it did have segregated schools. Her father was a big part of getting a new school for black children established in Brevard in early 1909, and a newspaper article about that effort noted his involvement and then said, quote, "What Jim undertakes generally goes."

• 7:45Holly Frey?

  I love that quote. Tragically, though, Jim Aiken died when Loretta was about 12. In addition to everything we just mentioned, he was a volunteer firefighter. At this point, most fire trucks were chemical engines. They carried tanks of bicarbonate of soda and acid, which were added to water on the scene to produce a stream of fire suppressant. Something went wrong while Aiken was responding to a call in 1909, and the tank exploded while he was trying to attach the hose. Jim was killed instantly, and multiple other firefighters were seriously injured.

• 8:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Jim Akin's death was a profound loss for the entire community of Brevard. His funeral was held at the White First Baptist Church because that was the biggest church in the area. An editorial in the French Broad Hustler described him as, quote, "one colored man who left the world better than he found it." The Brevard News wrote, quote, "The death of James P. Akin is a distinct loss to our town. He was the most widely known colored man in western North Carolina. He was a successful and enterprising businessman whose store on Main Street is well patronized. He was a member of the Baptist Church and several benevolent societies, was a member of the fire department where William E. Breece Jr.

• 9:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  was chief, and was always among the first to respond to the call of the fire bell and one of the hardest workers at every fire in the history of the town. He was in every way a responsible Negro, honest, energetic, industrious, and reliable. He had a wide influence among the colored race in this mountain section, besides having many friends among the white people, all of whom will be shocked to learn of his sudden death."

• 9:30Holly Frey?

  Obviously, racism is threaded through both of these quotes with the idea that Jim Akin was exceptional considering his race, but they do also speak to how prominent he was within the community.

• 9:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Loretta's mother, Mary, was the executor of her late husband's estate. She also took over the store while Loretta's grandmother helped to take care of her and her siblings. They did have a big family. She was one of at least nine children. Mary eventually got married again to a man named George Parton, and from that point, her name appeared in advertisements for the store as Mary Akin Parton. It appears that she kept the store going until 1912 or 1913, at which point she sold the building to Parton and the couple moved away from Brevard, first to Washington DC and then to Cleveland, Ohio.

• 10:20Holly Frey?

  A lot of more recent articles about Moms Mably say that her mother was killed just a couple of years after her father, after being hit by a truck while crossing the street on Christmas Day. That's all very sensational, but it does not seem to be correct. Mary and George are listed in the 1940 census as living in Cleveland, with George's occupation at the time listed as waiter. It is possible that Mary was killed after being hit by a truck. Tracy was not able to confirm her cause of death, but if she was, that happened in 1946 or 1947, and not when Loretta was still a young girl.

• 10:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  However, in addition to her father's death, Loretta's life took a traumatic turn when she was still quite young. Multiple sources say that she was raped by two different men before she turned 14, and that both times she became pregnant and arranged adoptions for her children, or someone arranged those adoptions for her. Other accounts, though, say that it wasn't really the arrangement of a formal adoption, that Loretta had left her children in the care of two women who later moved away and disappeared, and she didn't get to see her children again until they were adults.

• 11:31Holly Frey?

  Yet other accounts say that Loretta's father or stepfather either forced her to marry a much older man, or pressured her to do so, and that is why she left home as a teen. But there's no documentation of a marriage, although there is some reporting in Brevard News about a court case in 1913, that was State versus Bunyan Mills. This was a seduction under promise of marriage case in which the prosecuting witness was named Loretta Aiken. This case was introduced in August, but dismissed in September, when it was found that there had been no formal marriage contract.

• 12:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  In her conversation with Studs Terkel, Moms Mably also talked about working as a wet nurse in Asheville at the age of just 14, and having to deprive her own child of milk so that she would have enough to feed the baby that she was nursing. This recording is truly heartbreaking with Mably talking about telling her baby daughter, who she calls Lucretia, not to cry because she was stronger than baby Lois, who she was being paid to care for. So Lois needed more to eat. Mably talked about loving Lois like her own baby and how much it hurt not to know what happened to her after her employment had ended. This interview stresses that Lois started to feel like her own child,

• 12:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  but at least to me, it doesn't seem to imply that she had also lost contact with her daughter, Lucretia. Mably also talked in multiple interviews about being pregnant and having her baby with her at the start of her career.

• 13:06Holly Frey?

  But when Moms Mably died in 1975, obituaries and memorials listed four children among her survivors, but none of them are named as Lucretia or are old enough to have been born when Moms was 14. Yvonne, the oldest daughter, is described as 58 at the time of her mother's death. That means that her mother would have been about 18 when she was born. Yvonne's younger siblings were listed as Christine, Bonnie, and Charles, with some sources noting that Charles was her brother's child who she adopted. So, some accounts conclude that Yvonne and Christine were the children who were reunited with Mably as adults, and others conclude that those were just two different people.

• 13:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, there are also a bunch of family trees that list Christine's middle name as Luceria, which is not the same as Lucretia, but is close enough that has made people wonder, like, was this the same baby? Was she calling the baby by a middle name and, like, the spelling has gotten garbled somewhere? If so, that means the years are also garbled. There's a bunch that's unclear, but whatever the exact circumstances are, the young Loretta Mary Aiken left home at the encouragement of her grandmother, who thought that she should see the world beyond Brevard. And we will get to that after a sponsor break.

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• 15:01Holly Frey?

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• 15:45Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 17:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  In that 1961 oral history with Studs Terkel, Moms Mabley talked about her family's deep religious faith. When her grandmother, sometimes this is also, she says it was her great-grandmother, it's a little blurred, encouraged her to leave Rivard. She told her to quote, "Put God in front and go ahead." And this became a motto for Moms Mabley's life. The timeline for that life is tricky to piece together though, because there are plenty of things like advertisements for her performances, but otherwise, a lot of the time, there's not a lot of concrete documentation. Sometimes Mabley's interviews contradict each other or they contradict the documentation that does exist. So things like census records.

• 18:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  To be clear, I'm not suggesting that she was intentionally deceptive with any of this. She gave a lot of these interviews in the last couple of decades of her life. And I know I don't remember exactly when things happened in my childhood versus other events, so who knows?

• 18:56Holly Frey?

  It does seem that after her mother moved to Cleveland, Moms Mabley, still known at that time as Loretta Aiken, went there to join her. She was pregnant at that time as the result of a rape, and she had planned to go from Cleveland to Detroit to terminate that pregnancy. But something told her not to. She told Studs Terkel that when she was 15, trying to work out a way to support herself and her child, she prayed for guidance and heard a voice that said, quote, "Go on the stage."

• 19:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  In Cleveland, Loretta lived with a pastor and his family. And the house next door was a boarding house that was home to a lot of performers. One of them, Bonnie Bell Drew, helped her get a start in show business. Mabley's daughter Bonnie, who was born in 1920, was named Bonnie after Bonnie Bell Drew.

• 19:47Holly Frey?

  Loretta Aiken got a job with the Theater Owners Booking Association, which was a vaudeville circuit for black performers that was established in the 1920s, with venues primarily in the southern and midwestern states. Its performers gave it nicknames like "tough-on-black actors." The schedules were very grueling, the pay was low. But Mabley later said that anyone who got to the end of the circuit had a solid foundation in all kinds of fundamentals, including singing, dancing, and comedy. This was in part because every performer had to learn every part in case somebody got sick or injured or just dropped out of the show. Other performers who got their start on this circuit included Gertrude Ma Rainey, Josephine Baker, and Sammy Davis Jr.

• 20:32Holly Frey?

  when he was still a child.

• 20:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  In her later life, Moms Mabley told a story about being sick while working this circuit. And an older fellow performer named Leroy came into her room to check on her. Police raided the hotel after an unrelated altercation and searched all of the rooms. And when Leroy was found in the room of the teenage Loretta Aiken, they were forced to get married. But according to Mabley, there was no marriage license, no formal paperwork associated with this marriage. And Leroy was more like a father figure to her than a spouse.

• 21:07Holly Frey?

  Loretta was traveling through deeply segregated parts of the US, many of which were also well-known for racist violence. She was earning only about $14 a week, which was not enough to support herself and her child. So her mother was sending money to help with food and lodging. But then another pair of black performers took notice of her and helped her move into higher-paying gigs. Those were Jody and Suzy Edwards, aka Butterbeans and Suzy, who were a song and dance duo. Their act was very comedic with a lot of double entendre. Their best-known song was "I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll."

• 21:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  You can find recordings of this on the internet if you want.

• 21:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Honestly, if you've never heard any of Moms Mabley's comedy, just pause this and go to YouTube.

• 22:01Holly Frey?

  She's so funny.

• 22:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Extremely funny. At multiple points while doing research, I stopped what I was doing and watched some Moms Mabley. Anyway, Loretta moved from the Theater Owners Booking Association, where most of the venues were white-owned, to the Chitlin' Circuit, which was kind of its successor. Those theaters were primarily black-owned and operated. And sometime during this period, she started performing under the name of Jackie Mabley.

• 22:28Holly Frey?

  Mabley herself told multiple stories about where this name came from. One was that Jack Mabley had been a boyfriend and that, quote, "He took a lot off me, and the least I could do was take his name." Another was that the Jackie part was her own invention, but Mabley was the last name of a young man she had been engaged to. But that didn't work out because he was a Canadian and neither of them wanted to move to the other's country.

• 22:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  Regardless, her motivation for changing her name seems to have been that her oldest brother thought her stage career was disgracing the family. Not all of her family shared that opinion, though. She had a younger brother, Eddie Parton, who helped write some of her material.

• 23:09Holly Frey?

  She was being billed as Jackie Mabley by 1925, and she had established Jackie as an onstage character. She was in her 20s, but she imagined this character as in her 60s, patterned after her grandmother, Jane. As Jackie Mabley, she would sing, dance, and tell jokes and stories. She eventually made her way to New York, where she was featured at Connie's Inn in Harlem after it opened in 1923. Like the Cotton Club, where Mably also went on to perform, Connie's Inn featured black performers for an all-white audience.

• 23:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  As her reputation grew, Mably kept getting better and more lucrative bookings. She also claimed that she discovered Pearl Bailey during these years. She said in a 1974 interview, quote, "I taught Pearl Bailey everything she knows. She was a blues singer, and I said, 'Girl, you're funny. You should be a comedian.'"

• 24:01Holly Frey?

  While Mably's stage career initially included a mix of singing, dancing, and comedy, over time, she was focused more and more on stand-up, before that term was even coined. In her stage persona of Jackie Mably, she helped establish the conventions of stand-up comedy as an art form.

• 24:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  She was billed as Jackie Mably for several years before other performers gave her the name of Moms. In her own words, quote, "Even though I was young, they would always bring their problems to me to settle." She was a mothering presence. She was someone that other performers could turn to for support and who would help people get money for rent or a ticket home when they needed it.

• 24:40Holly Frey?

  Moms Mably blurred a lot of lines with her gender and sexuality, both on and off stage. In her onstage persona, she wore a baggy house dress, sagging socks, slippers or beat-up house shoes, and a floppy hat. Often, these clothes aggressively did not go together. She had a stooped posture on the stage, and as she got older and started wearing dentures, she would perform with her teeth out. This persona wasn't exactly androgynous. The character was a woman who went by Moms, but it was blurry enough that various people wrote into newspaper question-and-answer columns over the course of her career to ask if Moms Mably was a man or a woman.

• 25:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  As far as her appearance and her demeanor went, Moms Mably's stage persona could come off as almost sexless. But at the same time, her comedy could be very risque. She did not swear. Nothing was sexually graphic in a way that if somebody said that, really risque, like today. You would imagine something quite different. There was a lot of double entendre, though. And one of Mom's running themes was about her attraction to young men and the uselessness of old men unless an old man was bringing her a message from a young man.

• 26:01Holly Frey?

  Offstage, people who performed with Mably have talked about her openly having relationships with other women. In some photos, she's shown as elegantly attired in a dress and pearls, and in others, she's in handsome suits that are more androgynous or almost aggressively masculine. In the 2013 documentary, Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mably, dancer and comedian Norma Miller said, quote, "We never called Moms a homosexual. That word never fit her. We never called her gay. We called her Mr. Moms."

• 26:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  This carried over to her comedy and to the venues where she performed as well. For example, in April of 1934, the Ubangi Club opened on the former site of Connie's Inn. One of its frequent headline acts was Gladys Bentley, who was an openly lesbian performer who wore men's attire and was sometimes backed up by drag queens. The Ubangi Club became known for both performers and clientele, who we would probably describe as LGBTQ today, and one of its performers was Moms Mably.

• 27:08Holly Frey?

  We will get into Moms Mably's later career after we pause for a sponsor break.

• 27:45Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

• 28:30Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:41Speaker 07

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• 29:24Speaker 07

  15 Sky Club visits plus four guest passes? That's up to $950 in annual value. Value estimate based on a $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. It's the kind of premium access that helps you feel right at home and at ease, no matter where you're headed. Apply today at www.delta.com/podcast. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending, requirements, and terms apply.

• 29:55Speaker 08

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• 30:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  A lot of Moms Mably's comedy career was really unique for the time. Most women working in comedy or on the stage at all were as part of a duo with a man. But Mably was a solo act. In 1939, she became the first woman to headline at the Apollo Theater as a solo comedian. For decades, she was really the only black woman doing solo stand-up. And again, this started before that term was even coined.

• 31:09Holly Frey?

  She was also appearing on Broadway in the 1930s at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. At this point, there were several Broadway productions with all-black casts, but they often had white directors and producers, and they were tailored for a white audience. But the shows Mably appeared in were developed and directed by black people, or they were otherwise focused on the black experience. In general, these shows did not run for long. They are often described as not appealing to white audiences and critics.

• 31:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1931, she was in Fast and Furious: A Colored Review in 37 Scenes at the New Yorker Theater. In addition to being part of the cast, Mably worked with author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston to develop some of the sketches, and Hurston appeared in this show as well.

• 31:56Holly Frey?

  Then she was in Max Rudnick's Blackberries of 1932: A sepia musical review. This ran at Liberty Theater west of Broadway on 42nd Street, and it ran for 25 performances.

• 32:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Then there was Swingin' the Dream in 1939, which I am just desperately curious about. This was a swing musical adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream with a cast that included Butterfly McQueen and Louis Armstrong. It ran for 13 performances. Reviews of it were not great, and I cannot imagine why. This sounds incredible to me. I mean, I can't imagine why. The answer why is racism, but I'm still.

• 32:38Holly Frey?

  Right.

• 32:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's, this sounds incredible to me. Uh, most of the script has been lost, which is one of the reasons I'm just desperately curious about it.

• 32:47Holly Frey?

  We'll put it on the time machine list. It's one of the stops we'll make. Mabley had some small film roles during these same years. Like her Broadway roles, these were in films that were made by and for black people, a genre that became known as race films. One of these was Emperor Jones, which came out in 1933, starring musician, actor, and activist Paul Robeson. Her film work continued into the 1940s, including playing her comedic persona in Killer Diller, which came out in 1947. In 1948, she played a boarding house matron in Boarding House Blues, in which the boarding house's residents, who are all performers, put on a show to save moms and her boarding house from bankruptcy.

• 33:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  The thing that she became the most known for during these years was her comedy onstage. She booked longer and longer contracts at the Apollo, ultimately appearing there more than any other entertainer and earning as much as $10,000 a week. She constantly changed up her act so that it would continue to appeal to returning members of the audience, and soon she was nicknamed the funniest woman in the world.

• 33:55Holly Frey?

  As the civil rights movement evolved in the 1950s and 60s, Mabley's comedy started to include more and more social satire and commentary about racism, sexism, and politics. This continued as white audiences became more aware of her with the evolution of comedy albums. Mabley recorded her first album, Funniest Woman Alive, before a live audience in Chicago in 1960, and it was released by Chess Records. It was a hit, and she went on to record 19 more comedy albums during her career, many of which made the Billboard 200. Her 1961 Moms Mabley at the UN hit number 16 on the Billboard charts, which was the highest ranking comedy album by a woman, and that record stood for the next decade.

• 34:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  As Mabley became more well-known to white audiences, she used her disarming stage persona to make social and political commentary that probably would have been impossible without it. Her sets included fictional conversations with world leaders where she set them straight on various wrongs. She made pointed observations about the realities of racism and segregation. For example, on her 1963 album, I Got Something to Tell You, she said, quote, "You know, the first thing I would do if I was president? I would give a certain Southern governor a job as ambassador to the Congo and let him go crazy looking for a men's restroom with white on it."

• 35:21Holly Frey?

  Throughout the 1960s, she also did benefit performances to raise money for causes like Southern Students Freedom Fund, which provided aid for students who had been arrested for their civil rights activism. She did a show at the Apollo Theater to raise money for the March on Washington, and she sold photographs during some of her shows to raise money for the Selma to Montgomery March. She was also a member of the NAACP, and she attended the White House Conference on Civil Rights in 1966. That inspired her album Moms Mabley at the White House. She also gave multiple performances at prisons all over New York, including Sing Sing and Rikers Island.

• 36:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mabley's television debut was also connected to all of this. In 1967, Harry Belafonte produced A Time for Laughter: A Look at Negro Humor in America. Belafonte described this as an effort to both demonstrate Black people's humanity for the white world and to inspire joy and laughter within the Black community. That was the first time Moms Mabley was on TV.

• 36:24Holly Frey?

  Mabley had long talked about seeing her audiences as her children. And when she started doing television, she said, quote, "The only difference I found when I started doing TV was that instead of looking at the audience as my children, I looked at the world as my children." She appeared on multiple televised comedy programs and variety shows, including The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Carol Burnett Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Flip Wilson Show. These television appearances introduced her to a larger white audience than her albums had, and that fed into bookings at venues like the Kennedy Center. But at that point, she'd been performing and famous among black audiences for 50 years.

• 37:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1969, Moms Mabley's cover of Abraham Martin & John, which is the song about the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy, hit number 35 on the Billboard charts. She performed this song as Moms, but it was a completely serious and audibly grief-stricken performance.

• 37:27Holly Frey?

  In the 1970s, Mabley's comedy included her opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War. And in a 1972 interview, she said, quote, "I've shed many a tear over those boys. I wanted to go over there, but the government said I was too old. But if I'd gone over there, I'd have said, 'Come on, children, let's go home.'"

• 37:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Also in 1972, she supported past podcast subject Shirley Chisholm's election campaign and appeared at a Stars for Shirley fundraiser.

• 37:57Holly Frey?

  In 1974, Moms Mabley made her last TV appearance as a presenter at the Grammy Awards with Kris Kristofferson. At the time, Kristofferson was 38, and the two of them played up Moms' attraction to young men. Mabley asked him the name of the song he wrote, and after he replied, "Help me make it through the night," answering, quote, "If you can make it for half an hour, it'll be all right with me." Their banter went on for a full five minutes before announcing the award that went to Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Mabley took her teeth out in the middle of it.

• 38:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's amazing. You can see this on YouTube also.

• 38:31Holly Frey?

  So good.

• 38:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Also in 1974, Mably had her first lead in a feature film. This was called Amazing Grace and she played Grace Teasdale Grimes. It's about a woman who goes up against a corrupt politician and its posters read, quote, "Who's coming to put an end to dirty tricks, crooked politicians and lying mayors? Who? America's most glamorous, sexiest female superstar, Moms Mably. It's about time."

• 39:00Holly Frey?

  Mably had a heart attack during the production for this film. She returned to the set after having a pacemaker implanted and she used her publicity for the film to promote voting. But this was her last appearance on screen. She died on May 23rd, 1975, in White Plains, New York at the age of about 78. She was survived by four children, five grandchildren, two sisters and three brothers, including her brother Eddie Parton, who had helped write some of her material. She had spent her last years living with her daughter Bonnie.

• 39:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  At least 500 people attended her funeral and the marquee at the Apollo Theater was changed to read Harlem mourns Moms Mably. Comedian Dick Gregory gave a eulogy in which he said that if she had been white, she'd have been known 50 years before.

• 39:49Holly Frey?

  Today Moms Mably is known as one of the founders of American stand-up comedy. A lot of later comedians have cited her as an inspiration, including Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Wanda Sykes, Arsenio Hall and Whoopi Goldberg, who, as we said, made a documentary about Moms in 2013, originally called I Got Something to Tell You, before it was picked up by HBO. In the 1980s, Clarice Taylor worked with playwright Alice Childress to write a play called Moms, which debuted at the Astor Place Theater in 1987. The character of Granny Clump in Eddie Murphy's The Nutty Professor is also a tribute to her.

• 40:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  And in Moms Mably's own words, "Her influence was more pervasive than all of that." Quote, "There's not a comedian in show business that hasn't stole material from Moms, not white or black. As fast as they steal them, God gives me some more." I love her.

• 40:45Holly Frey?

  Genius.

• 40:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh, and as I said, I had multiple times just stopped what I was doing and watched some... I watched Moms Mabley on YouTube and I also watched Wanda Sykes' appearance as her on Marvelous Mrs Maisel. I watched that three or four additional more times.

• 41:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  So yeah, I, I think a lot of her comedy definitely holds up. I have not listened to every, to every single album she has ever done. So I don't think I can make a blanket statement that every Moms Mabley joke has weathered the years well, but a lot of it is still hilarious.

• 41:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 41:52Speaker 09

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