Gery Scott performs in Germany, 1955

Gery with son Christopher (aged 6) and Pan American Airways executive Barry Eldridge at Frankfurt Airport, 1955. Collection Gery Scott.

For aviation enthusiasts: The Pan American Airways plane registration number can be seen - N773PA. It was a Douglas DC-7B named Clipper Endeavour. Entered service that year - 1955, and retired 1964. My thanks to John Steele and the Pan Am Historical Foundation 2015.

by Larissa MacFarquhar

In the Summer of 1955, at the height of the Cold War, Gery was invited to perform at a big music festival in East Germany: Communist officials had come around to jazz in the fifties, because they had been led, by Paul Robeson among others, to understand that real jazz (as opposed to white commercialisation) was the music of the oppressed American Negro. 

By that time, Gery was well known: she had sung with Chet Baker and the Woody Herman band and had gone solo - she was living in sin in Wiesbaden with her accompanist, a handsome German pianist named Igo Fisher, with whom she travelled to gigs all over Europe, east and west.

She had a recording contract with Supraphon in Prague, and her recording of “When the Saints Go Marching In” was No. 1 on the Czechoslovakian hit parade for more than a year.

The music festival was to take place on an open-air stage in a park and officials expected an audience of more than 70,000. They were quite nervous about it and they were adamant that Gery sing only pretty songs - nichts zu heiss, nothing too “hot” - but at the same time they were very keen that she sing her signature hit, “When the Saints Go Marching In,” because it was Dixieland and most definitely the music of the oppressed American Negro. 

Gery explained that it was a fast song and could get quite heiss, but the officials insisted that she go ahead and sing it none-the-less.

The park was teaming. There was an East German Dixieland band, a jazz singer from Romania, a jazz singer from Hungary, singers and bands from all over the place, but they were all warm-up acts for Gery, who would close the show.

By the end of her set, everybody was yelling for more and when at last she sang “When the Saints Go Marching In,” the crowd went wild, clapping and screaming and singing along. 

As she was taking her bows and saying thank you, a little boy about ten years old slipped onto the stage, through a two-man-deep cordon of policemen, thrust a copy of one of her records at her and begged her to sign it. Gery was so high and boy was so small that she did.

Gery singing at Landsthul Air Base, Germany, 1955. Collection Gery Scott

At that moment, the crowd broke through the cordon and rushed the stage. Gery, terrified, ran backwards and fell down the stage steps and a thick piece of wood sliced into her calf. She screamed in pain, Igo screamed in fear, seventy-thousand people screamed in excitement and police whistles and sirens were going off everywhere.

But before a doctor could remove the wood from her leg, the police rushed into the Red Cross tent and demanded that she and Igo get in their car and drive straight to the border without stopping.

They were accompanied on the journey by the East German police and then drove eleven hours to Prague, where they were due to record the next day.

By the time they arrived, Gery’s leg was so swollen that she was worried about gangrene.

A week later, Neues Deutschland, the East German equivalent of Pravda, carried an article stating that Western entertainers were not allowed to come to East Germany to try to coerce the young people into revolution. Gery was declared persona-non-grata and was never invited to perform there again.

Reprinted from “The Jazz Singer” by Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker, August 18, 2003