Edythe Baker: Fabulous Ziegfeld Girl and Jazz Piano Star

Edythe Baker was a distinctive figure in jazz world during the 1920s and 1930s, making her mark in a male-dominated profession. She excelled as a jazz pianist, composer, and recorder of popular music. Her beauty and talent also led her to both dance and play the piano in the renowned Florenz Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic.

Performing at an Early Age

Edythe Baker was born in Kansas in 1899 and moved to Kansas City, MO, around 1906 with her mother. As a child, she received piano and voice lessons at a convent. During her teenage years, she worked at the Nowlin Music Company in Kansas City. Baker did so well that it was reported that she “has become very expert in the handling of customers in the talking machine department as well as in the piano department,” partly because “Miss Baker is an accomplished musician.”

Another account had a theatre owner hiring her at fifteen so she could support her mother. Baker supposedly had no musical training, but learned some piano fundamentals from the man who wrote the “Melancholy Baby,” said to be the first torch song and a huge hit from the 1920s onward. She was also said to visit the Kansas City Orpheum Theatre, where she watched traveling Vaudeville shows and might have heard top ragtime and jazz piano players such as Scott Joplin, Bennie Moten, James Scott, and Joseph Lamb.

During her high school graduation ceremony in 1918, Baker was praised for her “brilliant piano solo.” That fall, she enrolled in the Chicago Fine Arts School to study classical piano.

On Vaudeville and Recording Piano Rolls

Not for long, though. By June 1919, she was in a vaudeville act, performing with Willie Smith. A few months later she was in New York in a new act with singer and shimmy dancer Nellie D’Onsonne. Soon afterward, Baker (now spelling her name “Edythe”) was reported making “pianola rolls for the Duo-Art reproducing piano,” which was was a player piano that automatically played prerecorded perforated rolls.

Major success followed quickly. In December 1919, Universal Music Roll advertised Baker as “the foremost ragtime pianiste of vaudeville.” Her playing was “both snappy and artistic, while her charming personality was apparent in everything she interprets.” In addition, “she is a composer of striking individuality,” with one of her songs, Be True to the Girl of My Dreams, already recorded.

A Ziegfeld Girl

She was cast in the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic of 1920 and 1921 to great acclaim. “Edythe Baker,” wrote one critic, “is one of the bright features of the Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic atop the New Amsterdam Theatre. Her act is entitled “Ten Fingers of Syncopation,” and her playing makes it difficult for audience members to keep their feet still.”

Following her tenure with Ziegfeld, Baker performed in six Broadway musicals, including The Blushing Bride (1922), The Dancing Girl (1923), and Big Boy (1925). In 1926, she relocated to London, where she quickly rose to prominence in the musical theater scene. She secured a significant role in One Dam Thing After Another (1927-1928), a play by Charles B. Cochran and Richard Rodgers. Rodgers expressed great admiration for Baker in his autobiography and commended her unique performance style.

Later Life

Edythe Baker led a glamorous life among the elite of London’s high society. It is rumored that she taught the Prince of Wales to dance the Black Bottom, a hugely popular (and somewhat risque) dance of the era.

Baker married banker Gerard d’Erlanger in 1928; they divorced in 1934. She returned to the United States in 1945 and married Girard S. Brewer in 1961. Baker died in 1971.