Herb Jeffries was the Bronze Buckaroo, star of five all-Black-cast singing-cowboy movies in the 1930s and ’40s. His sweet, rich baritone fronted Duke Ellington’s orchestra in the 1941 megahit “Flamingo” and countless other tunes and set women’s hearts a-fluttering. He crooned with every major orchestra in the big-band era and entertained the troops in World War II. On tour in the South, he slept in Black hotels with his bandmates and ate from the backdoors of restaurants. After the war, he opened a nightclub in Paris, in part to avoid the hate that was foisted on him as a Black man married to a White wife in America. On his return to Hollywood in the 1950s, Jeffries starred in several more movies and appeared in television shows throughout the 1960s and ’70s. He continued to sing in California nightclubs into the 1990s. Yet Jeffries was Black by choice, not birth. He was born Umberto Alejandro Ballentino in 1913, the son of a Sicilian father and Irish mother. He lived to age one hundred as a Black man and took the abuse that came with that identity. This article tells his story. It is one of many such stories of racial shape shifters that will appear in my book currently in progress, Race Changes.
The Bronze Buckaroo: Race and Identity in the Life and Career of Black Movie Star and Jazz Singer Herb Jeffries
PAUL SPICKARD is distinguished professor of history and affiliate professor of Asian American studies, Black studies, Chicana/o studies, East Asian studies, religious studies, and Middle Eastern studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has degrees from Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. He has held academic appointments at fifteen universities in the United States and abroad. He is the author or editor of twenty-four books and more than a hundred articles on race, migration, and related topics in the United States, the Pacific, Northeast Asia, and Europe, including Shape Shifters: Journeys across Terrains of Race and Identity (2020), Red and Yellow, Black and Brown: Decentering Whiteness in Mixed Race Studies (2017), Race in Mind (2015), Global Mixed Race (2014), Multiple Identities: Migrants, Ethnicity, and Membership (2013), Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (2007), Is Lighter Better? Skin-Tone Discrimination among Asian Americans (2007), Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World (2005), Racial Thinking in the United States (2004), and Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in 20th-Century America (1989). His current projects are Growing Up Ethnic in Germany and Race Changes: Shape Shifting in World History. He is the recipient of the Loving Prize from the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival (2011), the Richard A. Yarborough Mentoring Award given by the Minority Scholars Committee of the American Studies Association (2013), and the Robert Perry Mentoring Award from the National Association for Ethnic Studies (2016), as well as twenty-one teaching awards.
Paul Spickard; The Bronze Buckaroo: Race and Identity in the Life and Career of Black Movie Star and Jazz Singer Herb Jeffries. California History 1 May 2023; 100 (2): 85–104. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.85
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University of California Press