Aileen Stanley

Aileen Stanley, born Maude Elsie Aileen Muggeridge on March 21, 1893, in Chicago, Illinois, was a prominent American singer whose popularity peaked during the early 1920s. She died on March 24, 1982, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 89, and was buried under the name Aileen Stanley Muggeridge at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. The youngest of four children born to English immigrants Robert S. Muggeridge and Maria (née Capewell) Muggeridge, who had arrived in the United States in 1887, Stanley grew up in circumstances marked by early family loss. Her sister Elsie Sherrif Muggeridge died of typhoid in August 1892, passing the disease to their father, who died seven months before Aileen's birth, leaving their mother to raise the surviving children alone.

Stanley's performing career began in childhood, when she and her older brother Stanley sang and danced together in vaudeville under the billing Stanley and Aileen, with their widowed mother's encouragement. After her brother left the act, she continued as a solo performer, constructing her stage name by reversing the order of the original family billing. She went on to work in vaudeville and cabarets before establishing herself in New York City. Her Broadway career spanned from 1920 to 1930 and included appearances in the revue Silks and Satins, the revue Pleasure Bound, and the musical Artists and Models. Her New York debut in Silks and Satins in 1920 was a notable success, and that same year she made the first of what would become a large body of recordings.

The majority of Stanley's recordings in the 1920s were made for the Victor Talking Machine Company, though she also recorded for Edison, Pathe, Okeh, Brunswick, Vocalion, Gennett, and other labels with studios in the New York City area. On a number of her early recordings she was accompanied by Rosario Bourdon's Orchestra. According to Joel Whitman, her most commercially successful early recordings included "My Mammy" from 1921 and "Sweet Indiana Home" from 1922, both written by Walter Donaldson. She recorded additional Donaldson compositions throughout the decade, among them "My Little Bimbo Down on a Bamboo Isle" in 1920, "Dixie Highway" and "Carolina in the Morning" in 1922, "Back Where The Daffodils Grow" in 1924, and "Don't be angry with me" in 1926. She also recorded J. Russel Robinson and Con Conrad's 1920 jazz standard "Singin' the Blues," released as Victor 18703, and the Paul Whiteman and Fred Rose composition "Flamin' Mamie" on October 5, 1925, issued as Victor 19828-A with ukulele accompaniment by Billy "Uke" Carpenter.

Victor Records paired Stanley with singer Billy Murray for a popular series of duet recordings produced between 1922 and 1924, and again in the late 1920s. A 1925 Victor recording, "When My Sugar Walks Down the Street," on which Stanley shared vocal duties with a then-unknown Gene Austin, is credited with helping to launch Austin's career. Stanley also recorded for Black Swan Records, a label associated with African-American artists, under the pseudonyms Mamie Jones and Georgia Gorham. Her approach to blues material was noted as resembling that of northern Black vaudeville singers of the era. In her stage appearances she was billed under the monikers "The Phonograph Girl" and "The Girl With The Personality." In later life she was overheard to say that the song "I'll Get By" had been written for her.

Stanley was said to have invested heavily in the stock market and lost the bulk of her savings in the Crash of 1929. Around 1931 she relocated to London, where she recorded for His Master's Voice between 1934 and 1937. She once confided that she had unwittingly ended her own romance by introducing Wallis Simpson to Edward, Prince of Wales, at the home of Thelma, Lady Furness. In her later years Stanley worked as a singing teacher and vocal coach. Materials related to her life and career, spanning 1898 to 1983, are held in the Grayce S. Burian collection of Aileen Stanley materials at the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.