# Bill Ramsey։ Never lost the momentum from Frankfurt: Photo, Videos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2021/05/02/bill-ramsey%d6%89-never-lost-the-momentum-from-frankfurt-photo-videos/
- Published: 2021-05-02T13:57:39+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The American Bill Ramsey was a jazz singer, but in Germany and especially Hesse
he became a pop star. Only later, as a radio presenter, did he indulge his true 
passion. Now he is celebrating his 90th birthday.**

The man could sing, no question about it. But what he sang was perhaps a touch too
foreign, too American for the average German ear in the 1950s. Jazz and blues did
not reach the masses during the economic miracle. They certainly wanted to smell
the scent of the wide world, but preferred to do so in homeopathic doses.

And so the jazz singer Bill Ramsey, who is highly valued in musical circles, became
a veritable pop star, who sang the “sugar doll from the belly dance troupe”, “souvenirs”
or “Pigalle (The Little Mousetrap)” with a charming accent or let the listeners 
know that they were Mimi never goes to bed without a crime story ․

Significantly, it was the idea of ​​a German jazz pianist to turn the young American
from Cincinnati, who had come to Germany and Frankfurt as a soldier and performed
there in the jazz cellar, into a pop star. Heinz Gietz belonged to the legendary
Hotclub Sextett, one of the most important ensembles in the early days of Frankfurt’s
jazz history, but had noticed early on that jazz might bring applause, but it wasn’t
selling as well as pop music. And so he let talents like Caterina Valente or Bill
Ramsey sing not exactly challenging, but all the more lucrative songs.

The admiration for his role models such as Nat King Cole and Louis Jordan, Bill 
Ramsey never gave up with his turn to the light muse, for which his participation
in numerous entertainment films in the late fifties and early sixties stands. From
the mid-sixties, when interest in Schlager subsided somewhat in Germany with the
success of the Beatles, he finally took up “his music”, namely jazz and blues, and
sang in his native English. From then on, there were no hits, but the audience in
Germany, where he has found his home, has always remained familiar to him, not least
because of countless television programs in which he appeared as a musical guest
and as a presenter of his own programs.

He was also active as a musician, whether with his own swing and jazz programs or
as a much-acclaimed guest on the “Swing Legenden” tours with Max Greger and Hugo
Strasser. His encyclopedic knowledge, especially about swing, he has been expressing
regularly since the late eighties in the program “Swingtime” on the radio wave hr2-
kultur of the Hessischer Rundfunk, which led many fans to believe that Bill Ramsey
lived in Frankfurt.

He had only lived there in the early days and was even room neighbor of Rosemarie
Nitribitt for a while in a guesthouse before he moved to Zurich for many years, 
then lived in Wiesbaden and finally found his home in Hamburg from 1991 onwards.
He traveled to “Swingtime”, which was broadcast until March 1, 2019, before Ramsey
gave up the moderation for reasons of age, and thus remained connected to the city
where the career of an American jazz singer who became a German pop star began .
This singer can celebrate his 90th birthday on Saturday.

![Swing-Legende: Bill Ramsey bei einem Auftritt in Hamburg im Mai 2016. ](https://
i0.wp.com/media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/4258177859/1.7297486/format_top1_breit/
swing-legende-bill-ramsey-bei.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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