Nipsey Russell
By:
September 15, 2009
Like Bea Arthur, Pearl Bailey, and Redd Foxx, the televisual omnipresence of JULIUS “NIPSEY” RUSSELL (1918?-2005) belied his status as a veteran of less sanitized showbiz pursuits. He tap-danced his way out of his native Atlanta, acted with a Chicago stock company, and by the early ’50s was a popular emcee at Harlem’s Café Society-styled Baby Grand. Langston Hughes lobbied for the comic to play Jesse B. Semple in Hughes’ 1957 musical, Simply Heavenly. The same year, Russell appeared as interlocutor on the LP Christine Jorgenson Reveals, mediating many Americans’ first brush with transsexuality. (A “confirmed bachelor,” Russell’s own sexuality is as murky as Hughes’.) After Ed MacMahon tagged him “the poet laureate of television,” on the short-lived Missing Links, he delivered his trademark quatrains on innumerable Goodman-Todson quiz shows, while also taking on the odd movie role (The Wiz, Mario Van Peebles’ Posse). Russell sometimes slipped light socioeconomic commentary into his largely innocuous verse, as in 1974’s “To slow down this recession/And make this economy thrive/Give us our Social Security Now/We’ll go to work when we’re sixty-five.” Not Ali, perhaps, but as actors identifying as poets go, better Russell’s unpretentious doggerel than the neo-Beat posturings of Viggo Mortenson and Amber Tamblyn.
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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: | Roy Acuff |
READ MORE about members of the New Gods Generation (1914-23).