Laura Ella Dukes (June 10, 1907 – October 10 or 14, 1992), sometimes credited as Little Laura Dukes, was an American

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

singer, dancer, and

mandolin A mandolin ( it, mandolino ; literally "small mandola") is a stringed musical instrument in the lute family and is generally plucked with a pick. It most commonly has four courses of doubled strings tuned in unison, thus giving a total of 8 ...

banjo The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and usually made of plastic, or occasionally animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashi ...

and

ukulele The ukulele ( ; from haw, ukulele , approximately ), also called Uke, is a member of the lute family of instruments of Portuguese origin and popularized in Hawaii. It generally employs four nylon strings. The tone and volume of the instrumen ...

player. She performed and recorded in

Memphis, Tennessee Memphis is a city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the seat of Shelby County in the southwest part of the state; it is situated along the Mississippi River. With a population of 633,104 at the 2020 U.S. census, Memphis is the second-mos ...

, from the 1920s to the 1980s.

Life

She was born Laura Ella Smith in

North Memphis North Memphis is one of the five defined districts of Memphis, Tennessee. It includes smaller neighborhoods such as Klondike, New Chicago, Douglass, Hyde Park, Hollywood, Nutbush, Binghampton, Smokey City, Scutterfeld, Frayser, and Raleigh. ...

, where her father had been a drummer in

W. C. Handy William Christopher Handy (November 16, 1873 – March 28, 1958) was an American composer and musician who referred to himself as the Father of the Blues. Handy was one of the most influential songwriters in the United States. One of many musici ...

's band. He took her as a young child to theaters and taverns, where she began performing and later worked as a singer and dancer. She was often billed as "Little Laura" or "Little Bit", an allusion to her 4'7" height. She met blues singer Robert McCollum, later known as

Robert Nighthawk Robert Lee McCollum (November 30, 1909 – November 5, 1967) was an American blues musician who played and recorded under the pseudonyms Robert Lee McCoy and Robert Nighthawk. He was the father of the blues musician Sam Carr. Nighthawk was in ...

, in 1933, and began appearing with him as a duo. After initially learning

guitar The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected stri ...

, she later took up the banjo, ukulele and mandolin. Sleevenotes from ''Memphis Sessions 1956-1961''
reprinted at Amy Crehore blog ''Little Hokum Rag'', 16 May 2007. Retrieved 18 July 2013 She first recorded in 1934, playing mandolin on recordings made in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

by the

Memphis Jug Band The Memphis Jug Band was an American band (music), musical group active from the mid-1920s to the late-1950s. The band featured harmonica, kazoo, fiddle and mandolin or banjolin, backed by guitar, piano, washboard (musical instrument), washboard, w ...

, featuring

Will Shade William Shade Jr. (February 5, 1898 – September 18, 1966), known as Will Shade, was a Memphis blues musician, best known for his leadership of the Memphis Jug Band. He was commonly called Son Brimmer, a nickname from his grandmother Annie Brimm ...

, for

OKeh Records Okeh Records () is an American record label founded by the Otto Heinemann Phonograph Corporation, a phonograph supplier established in 1916, which branched out into phonograph records in 1918. The name was spelled "OkeH" from the initials of Ott ...

. Laura Dukes Discography
Wirz.de, Retrieved 18 July 2013 She also made recordings in the early 1950s with the Will Batts band, which were released some twenty years later, and performed with the Batts band intermittently. Later in the 1950s, she recorded several tracks with Shade and Gus Cannon, and in 1972 — as Little Laura Dukes — she recorded tracks that were first released on the Italian albums, ''Blues Oggi'' and ''Tennessee Blues Vol.1''. From the late 1950s, she mainly performed in Dixieland groups at parties and festivals, becoming a favorite with white audiences in Memphis. In 1976 she appeared in a

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...

television series, ''The Devil's Music'', and continued to perform in clubs in Memphis in the 1980s. She died in 1992 at the age of 85.

Notes

References

External links

*
Interview with Laura Dukes by Fred J. Hay
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dukes, Laura 1907 births 1992 deaths Singers from Memphis, Tennessee 20th-century African-American women singers American blues singers American ukulele players 20th-century American singers 20th-century American women singers