Singer Maxine Sullivan of ‘Loch Lomond’ Fame Dies

Maxine Sullivan, the diminutive singer who began as a child prodigy, became a popular favorite after recording “Loch Lomond” in the 1930s and remained a beloved symbol to jazz cognoscente for the next 50 years, has died.

The 4-foot, 11-inch Miss Sullivan, who remembered singing “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” while wearing high-top shoes at age 6, was 75 when she died late Tuesday at Westchester Square Hospital in New York City.

She had performed as recently as last month in Connecticut and in February at the Roosevelt Hotel’s Cinegrill in Los Angeles.

She was admitted to the hospital last week after suffering a seizure. Her few concessions to her health had come late in life. Less than a month ago, she told Times jazz critic Leonard Feather that she just recently had stopped smoking and drinking.

But she had not stopped performing and was looking forward to engagements later this year on ocean cruises devoted to jazz, a charity concert in London and a return engagement at the Cinegrill.

Her fame was interspersed with long periods of neglect. She often said she had been through three separate and distinct lives: as a prodigy in her native Pennsylvania, as a mature singer on the international scene from 1936 to 1957 and as an icon of melody who emerged from a 10-year retirement in 1967.

“I keep getting rediscovered,” she said.

Her sense of diction and timing were credited with keeping her a cherished, if often little known, member of the musical community. Her natural gifts lent themselves to subtlety in swing and not the bombastic qualities of physically more dominating vocalists.

She came from a musical family and grew up in Homestead, near Pittsburgh. Her uncle played drums in a band where the pianist was a then-young Earl (Fatha) Hines.

As a girl she hung out with her Uncle Harry’s Red Hot Peppers and had established a local reputation while still in her teens. It was simple enough to do, she said in the interview with Feather, “I was the only singer in town.”

(She had first sung at age 6 at a library show where her grandmother forced her to perform.)

Born Marietta Williams, she changed her name to Maxine Sullivan soon after going on the road during the latter days of Prohibition, singing in places she described as “knock three times, who’s there?”

While performing in New York she was recruited for a recording session by band leader Claude Thornhill, who had arranged a swing version of an old Scottish folk song, “Loch Lomond.” When a radio station refused to air the record because it was irreverent, the accompanying publicity led to overnight fame for the tiny vocalist.

Bored With ‘Loch Lomond’

She lamented years later that her being billed over the years as “The Loch Lomond Lady” so bored her (“I did that song four times a day for 20 years”) that she decided to retire in 1957.

But long before the ennui had set in, she had made other records and a 1938 film, “Going Places,” with Louis Armstrong and a young Ronald Reagan. Out of the picture came another of her signature songs, “Jeepers Creepers.”

She also appeared in “St. Louis Blues,” singing the title song and on Broadway as Titania in “Swingin’ the Dream,” a musical adaptation of “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” If the show is remembered at all these days, it is for another of Miss Sullivan’s timeless hits, “Darn That Dream.”

She married John Kirby, a bassist, and they performed on a radio series, “Flow Gently, Sweet Rhythm” which often featured jazz interpretations of classical themes.

She and Kirby divorced, and she toured hotels and clubs with the Glen Gray and Benny Carter orchestras and began to command salaries far greater than the $25 she was paid for the “Loch Lomond” recording session (with no royalties.)

Favorite in Great Britain

In 1948, she traveled to Great Britain, opening up new audiences which remained faithful and anxious for return visits until her death.

By 1957 she had wearied of both the road and “Loch Lomond” and stayed home for the next decade to raise her daughter while working as a health counselor (she had studied nursing).

But in 1967, when a club called Blues Alley opened in Washington, she was asked to inaugurate it. The next year, cornetist Bobby Hackett brought her to the Riverboat jazz club in New York and then an eight-week appearance with the World’s Greatest Jazz Band at the Downbeat club. She made records again, now long-playing ones, and was nominated for three Grammy awards, in 1982, 1985 and 1986. She also had given up singing “Loch Lomond.”

Her later recordings saluted the music of Harold Arlen, Jule Styne and Hoagy Carmichael rather than the blues composers of the 1920s, and she became a “new” voice to a generation young enough to be her grandchildren.

In 1985, she toured Japan after becoming in great demand at jazz festivals in France, Holland and Denmark.

In Tony Award Running

She was even nominated for a Tony award as a featured actress in the 1979 Broadway musical, “My Old Friends.”

By then her hair had become pewter gray, and her weight differed from her age by very few pounds.

But the voice remained as it had since those days in the speak-easies.

“The Sullivan sound,” critic Feather wrote,” “remains one of those immutable wonders in which simplicity, understatement and a lightweight sound that matches her dimensions have always been the bench marks.”