Early Life and Marriage
Clarice Vance, The Southern Singer was born in Ohio in 1870. She began her career in farce comedy in the early 1890s and was such a hit singing the songs interpolated into plot that she quickly won fame, singing ragtime and dialect songs as a single. When she performed with the James and Bonnie Thornton troop, he coined her, 'The Southern Singer'.
She married "Mose" Gumble, head of Remick Music Publishing in New York, in 1904, but divorced him in 1914. Moses Gumble was a well known song writer along with his brother, Albert but is remembered today as the man who gave George Gershwin his first job plugging songs at Remick. According to the 1900 census, this well known marriage was preceded by a marriage to William A. Sims who served briefly as her manager and according to the New York Clipper she was granted a divorce from John Blanchard in early early 1904. This was quickly followed by her marriage to Moses Gumble. Recent research into Ohio Pike county census records indicate that Clarice's mother's name was Mary Vance, solving the riddle of her stage name. Her middle name was actually, "Etta" not Ella. This was confirmed by Sterling Morris after obtaining a copy of the original notice in Variety of her marriage to Mose Gumble in 1904. The NY Times archives reveal that Clarice Vance later married Phelps Decker, a screen scenario writer and for a short time, manager in the NY offices of Universal Pictures. His services were terminated in early 1928 (see Onoto Watanna, The Story of Winnifred Eaton by Diana Birchall, University of Illiois Press, 2001) and discovered by his wife, "former vaudeville actress Clarice Vance" to have asphyxiated himself on Feb. 5th, 1928 in their apartment at 35 E. 15th St. NY. He was 16 years junior to Miss Vance.
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