LOS ANGELES -- Herb Jeffries, the jazz singer and actor who performed with Duke Ellington and was known as the "Bronze Buckaroo" in a series of all-black 1930s Westerns, died of heart failure Sunday morning at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 100.
His death was confirmed by Raymond Strait, who worked with Jeffries on his not-yet-published autobiography titled Color of Love.
With a mellow voice and handsome face, Jeffries became familiar to jazz fans, but segregation in the film industry limited his movie career. He scored a big hit with Ellington as the vocalist on "Flamingo," recorded in 1940 and later covered by a white singer, the popular vocalist Tony Martin.
Jeffries has been described as the only black singing cowboy star in Hollywood history and, more recently, after the deaths of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and others, as the "last of the singing cowboys."
Sometimes billed as Herbert Jeffrey, he starred in four Westerns aimed at black audiences from 1937 to 1939: Harlem on the Prairie, Two-Gun Man From Harlem, The Bronze Buckaroo and Harlem Rides the Range.
He was born in Detroit to a racially mixed couple, referring to himself in a 2004 interview with The Oklahoman as "an Italian-looking mongrel with a percentage of Ethiopian blood, which enabled me to get work with black orchestras."
Jeffries told American Visions, a publication on black culture, in 1997 that he was inspired to seek backing for the cowboy movies after seeing a black boy crying because other children with him "wouldn't let him play cowboy. But in the real West, one of every four cowboys was black."
Metro on 05/28/2014