A swing-era jazz vocalist who once shared stages with Billie Holiday, Count Basie and Duke Ellington is getting her name back in Germantown this month. Doris Rheubottom, who built a performing career but is absent from conventional jazz histories, is the subject of Swing Mezzo, an interdisciplinary choreopoem opening Friday at Young American Cider and continuing through November 27 at Our House Cultural Center.
The project is the work of Raina J. León, Philadelphia's 2026-2027 poet laureate, who lives in Chestnut Hill, and Norma Thomas, founding director of the Fayette County African American History and Cultural Center in southwestern Pennsylvania. According to The Chestnut Hill Local, which first reported the production, Rheubottom-Hackley lived from 1899 to 1985 and built a career spanning Philadelphia, Harlem and other East Coast cities. León and Thomas describe Swing Mezzo as “a community-rooted, artist-led performance reclaiming the legacy of Doris Rheubottom,” according to León's own project materials.
A Singer Erased, Then Rediscovered
Rheubottom appeared in more than 200 Black newspaper articles between the 1920s and 1950s, per the Local's reporting, and performed in jazz clubs alongside Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway and Bessie Smith. She also appeared in the 1932 musical short Smash Your Baggage, now preserved by the Library of Congress — a discovery León and Thomas made while researching her story, the Local reports. She was married to comedian Bland “Crackshot” Hackley, and the two often performed together.
Despite that résumé, she and her peers remain absent from jazz histories, according to León's project page. Norma Thomas, who wrote a book on the African American history of Fayette County, told the Local that Doris was famous as a performer but known to her own family simply as Aunt Doris. Rheubottom was buried in an unmarked grave in a historically Black cemetery until 2024, per the Local's account, and León said she and her mother raised enough money to change the grave marker after a podcast episode and a GoFundMe campaign. León's project page notes that her grave is now marked, though it does not specify exactly when that happened.
Piecing Together a Life From Scraps and Film Reels
León and Thomas researched Rheubottom using roughly ten newspaper articles at first, then many more, along with trips to the Library of Congress, a New York performing arts library, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and two family interviews, according to the Local. León photographed nearly 4,000 family photographs and created a scrapbook documenting part of Rheubottom's family life. The Local reports that León said Rheubottom preserved her costumes, photographs and news clippings from her performing career during her life, but they were thrown away after she died.
León's own biography threads through the project as much as Rheubottom's does. She grew up in Southwest Philadelphia, studied at Penn State, Columbia University and the University of North Carolina, and lived in Las Vegas, Germany and the San Francisco Bay Area before returning to Chestnut Hill with her husband and children in 2020, per the Local. She currently serves as a visiting professor for creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and is professor emerita at Saint Mary's College of California. An earlier project page describes an arts and history residency León held in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, built around interviews and artwork responding to Rheubottom's recovered life story.
What Audiences Will See Onstage
Swing Mezzo integrates archival research, original jazz compositions, live performance, poetry, digital collage and visual installation, weaving projected press clippings, playbills and photographs together with live poetry, jazz and ritual, according to León's project materials. The production celebrates Rheubottom and Black women whose artistry shaped American music. Musically, it features original compositions by pianist and composer Kendrah Butler-Waters, jazz standards performed by vocalist Hiwot Adilow, and musical interpretation from pianist Stephanie Cole and percussionist Karen Smith, with León contributing her own poetry throughout, per the Local's reporting.
The performance runs Friday at 7 p.m. at Young American Cider, 6350 Germantown Ave., kicking off a month-long residency at Our House Cultural Center, 6380 Germantown Ave., that runs through November 27. That residency includes exhibitions, workshops, film screenings and artist conversations throughout the month, the Local reports, and concludes with Blue Notes on Black Friday, a reception with music, food, dancing and conversation from 7 to 9 p.m. An interview published by LFG similarly described the project as opening November 6 at Young American Cider and running through November 27 at Our House Cultural Center.
Funding and a Related Archive Project
Swing Mezzo is supported by the Velocity Fund and the Puffin Foundation, according to the Local's reporting, while León's own project page additionally credits the Leeway Transformation Award among its backers. The LFG interview also notes a related initiative, Treasured: A People's Archive, which invites Philadelphians to explore local archives and tell their own stories through free poetry workshops, public discussions and community gatherings across the city.
Swing Mezzo frames Rheubottom's legacy as one obscured by racism and sexism. For a singer who once filled jazz clubs beside some of the genre's biggest names only to vanish from its official record, the Germantown stage offers something closer to a long-delayed correction.
