Maude Russell

New York Times
March 29,2001
by Joyce Wadler

Maude Rutherford, 104, Dies
High-Kicking Songster of 1920's

Maude Russell Rutherford, a singer and dancer in the glory days of black theater in the 1920's who always said she was the one who really introduced the Charleston on Broadway, died on March 8 at her home in Atlantic City. She is believed to have been 104.

Strikingly pretty, she was billed as the Slim Princess when she worked with Josephine Baker, Fats Waller and Pearl Bailey. Never a star, Ms. Rutherford was usually the soubrette or a featured performer and a great favorite at Harlem's Cotton Club.

She wrote her particular footnote to history in 1922 in the Broadway show ''Liza, '' an all-black revue with lyrics and music by Maceo Pinkard. While many dance histories credit the 1923 show ''Runnin' Wild'' with bringing the Charleston to Broadway, Ms. Rutherford led the ''Liza'' chorus girls in the dance a year earlier.

She remained proud of her dance abilities to the end of her life.

''I used to kick 32 times across the stage, and my legs would hit my nose,'' Ms. Rutherford told Jean-Claude Baker, who was reared by Josephine Baker and who is a student of black entertainment. ''I was a dancing fool.''

Ms. Rutherford was born in Texas to a black mother, Margaret Lee, and a white father, William McCann. With interracial unions prohibited, her parents never lived together.

As a teenager working as a ticket taker, Ms. Rutherford met Sam Russell, a star of the black theater with the comedy team Bilo and Ashes. He asked her to go on the road with him. She demanded marriage first. The marriage was violent and short. Ms. Rutherford, weary of being beaten, surreptitiously relieved her husband of $100, then struck out on her own.

Tall, with a sweet voice, she would play the bouncy, good-time girl, perhaps the comic relief. ''I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles'' was a youthful audition choice. Early in her career a producer tried to mold her as a blues singer, but, as Ms. Rutherford told Mr. Baker in a taped interview, it did not fit. The producer said, ''Honey, you stick to bubbles.''

Her style offstage was down to earth and no-nonsense, and she used language too vivid to be called plain-spoken; she described one colleague as ''so ugly she could take a stick and break day.''

Ms. Rutherford's theater credits included ''Dixie to Broadway'' (1924), ''Chocolate Scandals'' (1927) and ''Keep Shufflin' '' (1928). She left show business in the 1950's and in 1953 married her fifth husband, Septimus Rutherford, chief steward for the Moore-McCormack Lines. She worked as a switchboard operator in an Atlantic City hotel.

But she never lost her show-biz flair.

When her husband died in 1980, Ms. Rutherford had her name carved into the headstone she and her husband would share, as well as a birth date, Mr. Baker said.

But instead of 1897, which she had told friends was the year of her birth, the carved date was 1902.

''She said, 'By the time I die, nobody will be here to remember, so I will go forever in eternity five years younger,' '' Mr. Baker said.

Jean-Claude Baker Foundation