Laura "Vee" Loewenherz "Lawnhurst" Morris

Vee was born Laura Loewenherz to Richard Loewenherz and his bride Meta Fuld. Some records show Lowenherz or Lowenhertz, but city directories, multiple New York state censuses and a marriage announcement for both Richard and later Laura confirm Loewenherz. It was also probably an Anglicized version of Löwenherz (German for Lion Heart), expanding the umlaut version of ö into oe.

The 1900 Federal and 1905 New York State censuses showed Richard employed by a gas lamp manufacturer. There was another side to him, however, as he was a championship level figure skater, who warranted a few mentions in the New York papers of that period for placing well in competitions.

A 1917 caricature of Laura and her father at a skating palace opening.

The 1910 enumeration showed the young family living temporarily in Asbury Park, New Jersey, with Richard still working as a retail dealer for gas fixtures. Richard, Jr., would be born there in 1911. The Loewenherz family would soon be back in Manhattan, however. Richard hung on in the gas lamp business, as evidenced by the 1915 New York State census. However, electricity had taken over as the lighting source of choice, and he would soon make the switch himself.

In 1916 Laura, who had been following her father's passion for figure skating, won a championship in a New York competition. At the opening of a new skating palace in September 1917, she returned as a reigning junior champion along with her skater father, and they were both pictured in the New York Herald on September 12. However, the skating would not ignite her fancy as a career track. As both of Laura's parents were also musically inclined and amateur musicians, she was already taking piano lessons and increasing her own musical acuity.

The 1920 enumeration showed the Loewenherz family living in Manhattan with Richard now working as the sales manager for an electric light company. Throughout his career Richard had been doing relatively well, as there was usually a domestic in the home to help out Meta. This was also true for the 1925 New York State census, the first enumeration to show Laura working as a musician. She had been leading her own orchestra and had already learned how to score arrangements at a symphonic level. In 1923 when she was just part way through her 17th year, Laura's first copyrighted piece, Keyboard Konversation, made its appearance, followed by the Twentieth Century Blues, published under her newly acquired stage name - Vee Lawnhurst.

It is not entirely clear where the Vee came from. Although Laura's middle name or initial did not appear in public records, it may have been derived from that. However, Lawnhurst was clearly an Anglicized reduction of an alternate pronunciation of her last name, one that was also very unique, a useful tool in show business. That she had decided on it before she was even eighteen years-old makes it clear that she desired a career in music on her own terms.

The first clear use of this stage name was for piano rolls made for the DeLuxe roll corporation, as licensee of Welte-Mignon, or simply Welte. There are conflicting stories on how these rolls were produced. However, the one with the most credibility is that Vee would create and write down her arrangement, practice it until she felt confident enough that she could play it, and then sent her manuscript over to the staff pianist and manager of DeLuxe, Howard Lutter. He would then translate what she had put down into what sounded more or less like a hand-played roll. Some of the rolls had Vee's name only, and some had Howard's name added. She may have ventured over to the DeLuxe studio in New Jersey on a few occasions, but it is possible that the two agreed on this as a faster way of getting things done. Vee's age and the travel conditions may have had something to do with this as well. The results were something that few people would have been capable of playing, except for the originator. In the end, it was possibly more Lutter than Vee, but live performances suggested otherwise.

After a few rolls had been completed, on June 7, 1924, Vee's association with the DeLuxe and the Welte (Licensee) company for the purpose of piano rolls was announced in the Music Trade Review:

Vee Lawnhurst in 1924.

Vee had also reportedly made some rolls for Standard Music Roll in Orange, New Jersey, which were issued on some of the Standard labels, including VocoWord, Play-A-Roll and Arto. Most of her rolls were, according to her own recollection, ballads, not pop tunes. However, a number of popular songs and even fox trots, some released as "dance rolls with words," do appear on various labels with her name attached, either "Played By" or "As Played By," the distinction being how the performance was laid down. vee lawnhurst piano roll on welte mignon label

vee lawnhurst piano roll on welte mignon label

By the end of 1924 Vee's name also appeared as part of the Ampico roster, as part of the American Piano Company's line of reproducing rolls, although this may have been in association with earlier work, as she was supposedly exclusive with DeLuxe by that time. She stayed with the company through at least 1928.

Another outlet for Vee was radio broadcasting, which suited her talents well. On her own, Vee started appearing as a soloist on WEAF in May or June of 1923 when she was still 17. The often eclectic and non-themed programs included combinations of classical and popular works, mostly as a lyric soprano rather than as a pianist. But by late summer her pianistic styles were featured as well. This led to her participation in Roxy's Gang, a group that was also involved in early radio broadcasts from 1924 through 1925 from the Capitol Theater in Manhattan. They were similarly broadcast over WEAF, and headed by Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel. The organization included the Capitol Theater's large orchestra, and at one point Eugene Ormandy was the concertmaster. Roxy's Gang helped to pioneer high class radio broadcasting of both classical and popular works. They made a few recordings in the 1923-1924 time frame for Brunswick, but it is unclear if Vee was any part of these.

At the end of 1925, Laura's engagement to Sylvester B. Morris was announced, and the public link between her given name and that of Vee Lawnhurst was made in the notice. As Vee, she was reportedly a bit shy when not at the piano, but had a lovely soprano singing voice that was partly responsible for getting her on the radio in the first place. The piano went along with that, of course, and it wasn't long before her playing became as popular as her vocals. After she was married to Sylvester in 1926, Vee still used her stage name outside of the home, and birth name inside. Another name added to the list was that of John Morris, who was born to the Morrises in 1927.

In 1929 Vee ventured again into composition, writing a poignant fox trot ballad, including the lyrics, Nobody's Fault But My Own. She would later write music to the words of other lyricists, so this was a rarity. By 1930 Lawnhurst was known a bit more for her pianistic prowess than her singing, except, perhaps, to select radio audiences. For the 1930 census, as Laura Morris, she listed her job as a radio singer, while Sylvester was a building engineer. As he was a contractor during the building boom of the late 1920s into the early 1930s, and she had plenty of income, but not plenty of time, the family was able to afford a domestic for their home.

As the Great Depression was underway, Vee was in the right place to keep the wolf away from the door. Even though piano roll and player piano sales had been plummeting since 1928, don't change cover

and record sales showed a sharp decline in 1931 and 1932, radio was a popular and, except for the acquisition of a receiver, a free medium. Advertisers wanted to be heard, and they knew that sponsoring the right entertainment would make consumers more likely to support those advertisers. So Vee was able to make a good living even as the economic slump of the 1930s deepened. Lawnhurst did, however, make a handful of recordings on various labels, including a pair of solo piano cuts on Perfect Records, and ensemble numbers as Vee Lawnhurst and her Cavaliers for Decca Records.

Most music composed during the 1930s, even though it was often available in sheet music form, ended up being performed on radio or records and was heard by more people that way. Vee ventured further into composing. After trying out a couple of lyricists, she started working with veteran writer Roy Turk. Between 1932 and 1934 they wrote a number of catchy tunes and ballads, and proved to be an effective team. Their songs were enough to gain Vee entry into ASCAP in 1933. During this same period, fellow female pianist Muriel Pollock (Donaldson) had been working with yet another fine pianist, Constance Mering, both on the air and on the Broadway stage. Vee had played at some point with both of those women. Mering had to step down from performance around 1930 (she died in 1933), leaving a vacant position next to Muriel. After the mourning period, they teamed up to play on the radio, making for a very popular duet act. Vee later confided that she was not able to sight read as readily as Muriel, but could improvise better. Their best performances came from a combination of Pollock's solid rhythmic foundation under Lawnhurst's dynamic and flashy improvisations.

A loss similar to Muriel's happened to Vee, as Roy Turk passed away in the fall of 1934, leaving her without a favored lyricist. In 1935 she started writing with Grace Mann, who, like Vee, had developed a professional pseudonym, Tot Seymour. Grace, who was sixteen years older than Vee, had been a staff lyricist for Irving Berlin's publishing company, accent on youth cover

and had written lyrics with other composers for female artists such as Sophie Tucker, Mae West, Belle Baker and even Fanny Brice of the Ziegfeld Follies. Her previous musical partners had included Lew Pollack, Jean Schwartz, Sigmund Romberg, J. Fred Coots and Pete Wendling. However, when she and Vee hit the airwaves with their songs, something was ignited, making them the first superstar female composing team of Tin Pan Alley, a status readily touted by their publisher, Famous Music Corporation, a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures.

After several years as a playing team, the Pollock and Lawnhurst era ended when Muriel and her husband, composer Will Donaldson, moved to Hollywood, California. This proved to be more or less the end of Muriel's playing career, but not of Vee's, and certainly not of her compositions. However, before that time, Lawnhurst and Seymour composed regularly for the radio show Your Hit Parade, which started broadcasting around the same they teamed up in the spring of 1935.

Lawnhurst, sometimes accompanied by other artists, would often play her material on the show, and it was sometimes relegated to other musicians as well. The popular show provided the duo with a forum that had not previously been available to composers, and they managed to place a number of hits into the mainstream as a result. Often, it was Vee's rhapsodic performances which put otherwise average material over the top. It also gave impetus for other popular artists to record and perform their tunes, and several were even interpolated into Broadway revues or shows. Some of the artists included Bob Crosby and his Bobcats, Thomas "Fats" Walller, Louis Prima, Ozzie Nelson, Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, and the lyrical Billie Holiday.

The late 1930s saw a marked attrition of both music and performances by Vee. She started avoiding the public spotlight and was on the way to a journey to a quiet retirement. on other one cover

Vee had also been separated from Sylvester part way through the decade, as the 1940 census showed her as divorced. She was living in Manhattan at 160 W. 73rd Street in a building with several other musicians and artists, listed as a songwriter with her own studio. Her son John J. was living with the widowed Meta and Vee's brother Richard, Jr., nearby in Manhattan. Sylvester had been remarried by the time of that enumeration.

Vee's last known song was published in 1945 at the end of the war. At age 40 she decided to retire, except for an occasional interview or appearance on a small scale. She appears to have been married once again to Jonathan Currier "Jack" Lewis of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, having wed him in Saint Petersburg, Florida, on April 3, 1947. The duration of their union is unclear, but he died unmarried in New York City in 1968. The income from her previous work kept Vee comfortable as she remained in her Manhattan apartment with her Mason and Hamlin piano. Well into her retirement, Vee was interviewed in the mid-1980s by pianists and historians Peter Mintun and Frederick Hodges concerning her musical life. According to Hodges she was quite old at the time, and her memory was "definitely not as sharp as one would have hoped." Somehow denying her own history, she emphatically insisted that she never made any fox trot piano rolls, and added with some attitude: "I only play ballads."

Whatever Laura Loewenherz may have believed, her dynamic history and the role she played in elevating the position of female composers and pianists on a path that was laid down by many predecessors of the two decades prior to her entry into the field cannot be denied. She died in 1992 at age 86.