Crooner Herb Jeffries no more

His death was confirmed by Raymond Strait, who worked with Jeffries on his not-yet-published autobiography titled Color of Love.

Herb Jefferies 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 on 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.

Among the other songs he did with Ellington were There Shall Be No Night and You, You Darlin’.

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.