Lee Morse

Lena Corinne Taylor was born on November 30, 1897, in Cove, Oregon, a small town in the Grande Ronde Valley, the ninth of twelve children born to Pleasant John Taylor, a local pastor from Texas, and his wife Olive Higgins Fleming. Her death certificate lists her birthplace as Union County, Oregon, though some sources cite Portland. The Taylor family had a musical history, having toured Idaho by covered wagon as the Taylor Family Concert Company before purchasing a ranch in La Grande, Oregon. After the ranch was foreclosed upon, the family relocated to Kooskia, Idaho. Morse learned to sing by age three, largely by imitating her brothers, a habit that contributed to her later command of deeper vocal registers. On May 2, 1915, she married Elmer Morse, a woodworker from Wallace, Idaho, and gave birth to a son, Jack, in 1916. She separated from her husband in 1920 to pursue a singing career, and he filed for divorce on February 18, 1925, on grounds of desertion and abandonment. Elmer Morse died of scarlet fever in Spokane, Washington, in October 1926, at age 35. Despite having left her husband and child years earlier, Morse retained custody of Jack.

Her first professional notice came around 1918, when she performed under the name Mrs. Elmer Morse at a local silent movie house, accompanying herself on guitar in small Pacific Northwestern towns including Spokane, Washington, and Chewelah. In 1920, she traveled with her father to San Francisco, where he served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. While there, she performed at the Hotel St. Francis and was noticed by vaudeville producer Will King, who signed her to a contract. In 1921, she began working in musical revues under Kolb and Dill, and in 1922 she joined the Pantages circuit with a fifteen-minute act. A November 1922 Variety reviewer noted that she gave the impression of a male impersonator, yodeled rather sweetly, and sang blues numbers better than the majority of performers doing so at the time.

Known professionally as Lee Morse, she built a career as a jazz and blues singer-songwriter, composer, guitarist, and actress whose greatest popularity came in the 1920s and early 1930s as a torch singer, though her career began around 1917 and continued until her death. She possessed a contralto vocal range and was recognized for a strong, deep voice that often belied her petite frame. One of her trademarks was a distinctive style of yodeling. Over the course of her career she recorded more than 200 songs, making her one of the most recorded female singers of the 1920s. Her younger brother was Glen H. Taylor, a country singer and Democratic politician who served in the United States Senate from Idaho and ran for Vice President of the United States alongside Henry Wallace.

In 1923, Morse won a role in the touring version of the revue Hitchy Koo, a cast that included Raymond Hitchcock, Marion Green, Irene Delroy, Al Sexton, Busby Berkeley, and Ruth Urban. That same year she appeared on Broadway in the Shubert revue Artists and Models, which opened on August 20, 1923. Her Broadway career, which spanned from 1923 to 1930, also included the musical Simple Simon, produced by Ziegfeld. On the show's opening night, February 18, 1930, Morse had been drinking and was unable to remember the words or music during her performance. The producers asked Ruth Etting to substitute, and as a result the song Ten Cents a Dance became Etting's signature number rather than Morse's. The incident effectively ended Morse's Broadway career.

In 1924, Morse began recording with the Pathé label, where her records were billed as Miss Lee Morse owing to her deep voice. During this period she recorded a number of her own compositions, including Golden Dream Girl, as well as notable tracks such as Telling Eyes, Those Daisy Days, Deep Wide Ocean Blues, and Daddy's Girl. Pathé allowed her considerable creative latitude, and her recordings from this era feature the characteristic whoops, yips, and yodels that became part of her vocal identity. In 1927, she moved to the Columbia label alongside other prominent Pathé and Perfect vocalists including Willard Robison, Annette Hanshaw, and Cliff Edwards. From 1927 to 1932, she ranked as one of Columbia's most popular female performers, second only to Ruth Etting.

In the mid-1920s, Morse met pianist Bob Downey, who became both her stage accompanist and personal companion. The two performed international engagements together, including a tour of the United Kingdom that concluded with a show at the Piccadilly Theatre in London. They later opened a small club in Texas, which burned down in 1939, after which they relocated to Rochester, New York. Downey eventually left Morse, a loss that deepened her dependence on alcohol. Alcoholism had shadowed her career throughout its most prominent years and was a direct factor in the collapse of her Broadway prospects. Lee Morse died on December 16, 1954. In 2014, her rendition of If You Want the Rainbow was used in an episode of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.