I need you all to know that that photo is not of Esther Jones, it’s a Russian woman named Olya from a Betty Boop inspired photo shoot she did in 2008/9. Here’s another photo:
And here’s the photographer’s Livejournal page where they posted the photos. Not a mysterious, forgotten black woman from the 1920s, but a Russian model who probably finds it really weird that people keep posting this photo of her and saying she’s Esther Jones, who was a young black child.
Yep, Esther Jones / Baby Esther was a child star, not an adult, and looked like this:
And yes, she was probably indirectly the inspiration for Betty Boop’s voice; a white woman named Helen Kane sued the Betty Boop creators (for $250k!) and said they copied her singing style for the character, but then it turned out that she had been to one of Esther’s shows a few weeks before Kane adopted the ‘baby’ singing style. Other singers who had a similar singing style to Kane also testified that Kane was not the originator of the style, and she lost her case.
This is Helen Kane, who probably looks pretty familiar:
Despite being the basis of Betty Boop’s voice, Esther was not the source for Betty Boop’s look, which was modelled on the popularity of Clara Bow and generic ‘20s/’30s fashion trends (hence Helen Kane’s similar appearance):
This post, I think, tries to make it look like Esther was the inspiration for both Betty Boop’s voice and aesthetic, which isn’t quite true (not that it makes much difference; she was still exploited.) Esther’s career essentially ended when she was about 15, and no-one knows what happened to her after that.
You can and should read about Esther’s life and career here. (Be aware there are lots of photos of newspaper articles from the ‘20s and ‘30s, including racist caricatures of Esther.)
Another photo you often see which is touted as Esther Jones is this one:
But that’s not her either; some sources claim it’s probably another singer named Esther Bigeou, but there’s no concrete valid source I can find which says who she is, so I’m not going to claim to know who it is. It’s not Esther Jones, though; there’s very little information as to what happened to Esther after her career ended in about 1934, when she would have been around 15.
This is Little Esther Phillips (real name Esther Mae Jones), who also sometimes gets mistaken for Baby Esther / Esther Jones on account of their incredibly similar stage names and birth names. Esther Phillips was also a singer, but a completely different person and was active in the ‘40s-’80s, not the ‘20s-’30s:
This post is Kind Of Bad, Actually because it proclaims to be giving a black woman (except actually a black girl, because Esther was a child) back her voice and historical importance, and then takes a huge dump on that by using an unsourced, disingenuous photo of a white woman instead of literally typing ‘Baby Esther Jones’ into Google and finding a photo of Esther herself (after going through the sources and checking for validity, obvs.) It’s already bad enough that she had her voice stolen. Let’s not erase her face, too.
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