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PART 1: THE GIRLS ON THE NEGATIVES
Our story begins in the summer of 2015, and with a find in a thrift store. A photographer in Richmond, Virginia, finds herself drawn to a box containing some photo negatives. Holding them up to the light, she can see an evocative scene of a woman, dressed in 1950s period clothing, along the shore of an unknown beach.
The photographs were even more stunning when developed. The woman seems to be looking out to sea wistfully, as if waiting for a ship to arrive but resigned to knowing it never will. In a dramatic sequence, the images reveal her drawn more into the water. A second woman, with bright blonde hair and a crimson red dress, appears in a few other pictures, standing along the rocky shoreline as if to bear witness to the first woman's sadness. From a distance, she too seems ultimately drawn into the same watery fate.
The photographer who found these gorgeous images was awestruck by their beauty. She put out a call on social media: can anyone help #FindTheGirlsOnTheNegatives?
And just about everyone else who saw the photos was just as mesmerized. Her Facebook post garnered thousands of comments and shares, and the mystery drew the attention of local and national media alike. Forensic sleuths managed to identify not only where the photos were taken, but approximately when by only a few days. Theories were numerous, but the actual identities of the two women remained elusive for several years.
And yet, the answer was hiding in plain sight. Or maybe just in the middle of a music shop's bin of used vinyl records.
Edison International was a small record label founded in Hollywood, California, in the late 1950s. The label went belly up after a few short years, and eventually the rights to the Edison catalog fell under the ownership of Sundazed Music. One of the albums Sundazed inherited was a jazz album from an otherwise unknown singer named Claudia Thompson, backed by famed jazz guitarist Barney Kessel. The album, titled "Goodbye to Love," featured the confident, assertive voice of Claudia. Many of the songs carried a somber tone of separation and the breakup of relationships, sung by a woman who sounded like she had experienced a lifetime of heartbreak.
The cover of the album? A woman in a blue dress, knee-deep in ocean waves and looking out at an uncertain future.
A girl on the negative has been found: Claudia Thompson?
Yes. And no.
It'd be easy to assume the young, forlorn woman featured on the album cover would be the voice behind those sad songs, no? And that is precisely what just about everyone who encountered the record over the next five decades concluded. But by pure chance, about a year after that online call first went out to #FindTheGirlsOnTheNegatives, someone updated her artist entry on Discogs.com with a new photo of Miss Thompson. "Found this headshot in an old copy of her LP, along with a handwritten letter," the uploader noted. The headshot in question:
Claudia Thompson indeed is one of the two girls in the negatives. Just not the one on the album cover.
"Here is the album," Claudia wrote on the back of her photo, dated December 14, 1959. "I hope you will enjoy and be able to do something with it. I will be waiting to hear from you."
It's not clear who she was writing to, but we know what the response was: the recipient was not "able to do something with it" and "Goodbye to Love" quickly faded into obscurity.
Who was Claudia Thompson? What happened to her after she recorded her lone album? The original questions surrounding those negatives found in a Richmond thrift shop seemed to be answered, but still, much of Claudia's life before and after her lone album remained shrouded in mystery.
But just like her album, Claudia herself had been hiding in plain sight all along.
PART 2: AN END TO WHITEWASHING
"Goodbye to Love" remained an obscurity, although beginning with the advent of the compact disc in the 1980s it would see an occasional reissue, probably with Barney Kessel's name attached being the draw to any unsuspecting jazz cats not knowing what they were about to get into the first time they hit the "Play" button.
Sundazed Music inherited the old Edison International catalog in the early 2000s but, perhaps not realizing right away what a gem of an album they now had in their possession, did nothing with it for several years. By 2016 with the vinyl resurgence well underway, Sundazed's sub-label Modern Harmonic -- using the original three-channel master tapes and cutting lacquers from mastering engineer Kevin Gray -- re-released the album to a new generation of collectors and jazz fans. "A sultry and sophisticated songbird," the reissue's hype sticker quipped.
The viral post to #FindTheGirlsOnTheNegatives had pretty much petered out at this point, being relegated to a "Hey, remember those really cool pictures of those women on the beach? Huh, I wonder what happened with that" sort of afterthought among most who had seen it.
But enough people did remember and perhaps with the Modern Harmonic reissue, the connection was definitively made between album and photographs. Then when Claudia's Discogs page was updated with a vintage photo of the artist herself in 2018 -- a light-skinned African American woman with bright blonde hair -- it came as a sort of revelation.
"I got the chills," Modern Harmonic general manager Jay Millar would later recount. "We took it for granted. We assumed, 'Why wouldn’t it be the woman on the cover?'"
If you've made it this far and haven't actually listened to any of Claudia's music, I ask you to take a moment to do so now:
One thing that becomes noticeable in retrospect is how Claudia sings. Thompson's voice sounded less like Black artists of the era like Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald and more like a white singer, such as Peggy Lee.
By now, Modern Harmonic's 2016 reissue had sold out and was going for a decent amount of money in the aftermarket. With all the puzzle pieces finally in place, Modern Harmonic moved ahead in 2021 to reissue the album a second time... now with liner notes from author and music journalist Laina Dawes to provide the historic context of the album's creation; and perhaps more importantly, a new cover with the second woman in the photoshoot. The woman with bright blonde hair and a red dress.
Claudia Thompson was finally on the cover of her album.
"Goodbye to Love" is still available for purchase on CD through MH's website, and Vinyl Me, Please put out an exclusive vinyl pressing of 500 copies that has since sold out. The album itself could now stand testament as a truly inspired work of a young, talented, African American woman in the late 1950s. What became of her afterward, remained a big question mark.
Our story begins in the summer of 2015, and with a find in a thrift store. A photographer in Richmond, Virginia, finds herself drawn to a box containing some photo negatives. Holding them up to the light, she can see an evocative scene of a woman, dressed in 1950s period clothing, along the shore of an unknown beach.
The photographs were even more stunning when developed. The woman seems to be looking out to sea wistfully, as if waiting for a ship to arrive but resigned to knowing it never will. In a dramatic sequence, the images reveal her drawn more into the water. A second woman, with bright blonde hair and a crimson red dress, appears in a few other pictures, standing along the rocky shoreline as if to bear witness to the first woman's sadness. From a distance, she too seems ultimately drawn into the same watery fate.
The photographer who found these gorgeous images was awestruck by their beauty. She put out a call on social media: can anyone help #FindTheGirlsOnTheNegatives?
And just about everyone else who saw the photos was just as mesmerized. Her Facebook post garnered thousands of comments and shares, and the mystery drew the attention of local and national media alike. Forensic sleuths managed to identify not only where the photos were taken, but approximately when by only a few days. Theories were numerous, but the actual identities of the two women remained elusive for several years.
And yet, the answer was hiding in plain sight. Or maybe just in the middle of a music shop's bin of used vinyl records.
Edison International was a small record label founded in Hollywood, California, in the late 1950s. The label went belly up after a few short years, and eventually the rights to the Edison catalog fell under the ownership of Sundazed Music. One of the albums Sundazed inherited was a jazz album from an otherwise unknown singer named Claudia Thompson, backed by famed jazz guitarist Barney Kessel. The album, titled "Goodbye to Love," featured the confident, assertive voice of Claudia. Many of the songs carried a somber tone of separation and the breakup of relationships, sung by a woman who sounded like she had experienced a lifetime of heartbreak.
The cover of the album? A woman in a blue dress, knee-deep in ocean waves and looking out at an uncertain future.
A girl on the negative has been found: Claudia Thompson?
Yes. And no.
It'd be easy to assume the young, forlorn woman featured on the album cover would be the voice behind those sad songs, no? And that is precisely what just about everyone who encountered the record over the next five decades concluded. But by pure chance, about a year after that online call first went out to #FindTheGirlsOnTheNegatives, someone updated her artist entry on Discogs.com with a new photo of Miss Thompson. "Found this headshot in an old copy of her LP, along with a handwritten letter," the uploader noted. The headshot in question:
Claudia Thompson indeed is one of the two girls in the negatives. Just not the one on the album cover.
"Here is the album," Claudia wrote on the back of her photo, dated December 14, 1959. "I hope you will enjoy and be able to do something with it. I will be waiting to hear from you."
It's not clear who she was writing to, but we know what the response was: the recipient was not "able to do something with it" and "Goodbye to Love" quickly faded into obscurity.
Who was Claudia Thompson? What happened to her after she recorded her lone album? The original questions surrounding those negatives found in a Richmond thrift shop seemed to be answered, but still, much of Claudia's life before and after her lone album remained shrouded in mystery.
But just like her album, Claudia herself had been hiding in plain sight all along.
PART 2: AN END TO WHITEWASHING
"Goodbye to Love" remained an obscurity, although beginning with the advent of the compact disc in the 1980s it would see an occasional reissue, probably with Barney Kessel's name attached being the draw to any unsuspecting jazz cats not knowing what they were about to get into the first time they hit the "Play" button.
Sundazed Music inherited the old Edison International catalog in the early 2000s but, perhaps not realizing right away what a gem of an album they now had in their possession, did nothing with it for several years. By 2016 with the vinyl resurgence well underway, Sundazed's sub-label Modern Harmonic -- using the original three-channel master tapes and cutting lacquers from mastering engineer Kevin Gray -- re-released the album to a new generation of collectors and jazz fans. "A sultry and sophisticated songbird," the reissue's hype sticker quipped.
The viral post to #FindTheGirlsOnTheNegatives had pretty much petered out at this point, being relegated to a "Hey, remember those really cool pictures of those women on the beach? Huh, I wonder what happened with that" sort of afterthought among most who had seen it.
But enough people did remember and perhaps with the Modern Harmonic reissue, the connection was definitively made between album and photographs. Then when Claudia's Discogs page was updated with a vintage photo of the artist herself in 2018 -- a light-skinned African American woman with bright blonde hair -- it came as a sort of revelation.
"I got the chills," Modern Harmonic general manager Jay Millar would later recount. "We took it for granted. We assumed, 'Why wouldn’t it be the woman on the cover?'"
If you've made it this far and haven't actually listened to any of Claudia's music, I ask you to take a moment to do so now:
One thing that becomes noticeable in retrospect is how Claudia sings. Thompson's voice sounded less like Black artists of the era like Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald and more like a white singer, such as Peggy Lee.
By now, Modern Harmonic's 2016 reissue had sold out and was going for a decent amount of money in the aftermarket. With all the puzzle pieces finally in place, Modern Harmonic moved ahead in 2021 to reissue the album a second time... now with liner notes from author and music journalist Laina Dawes to provide the historic context of the album's creation; and perhaps more importantly, a new cover with the second woman in the photoshoot. The woman with bright blonde hair and a red dress.
Claudia Thompson was finally on the cover of her album.
"Goodbye to Love" is still available for purchase on CD through MH's website, and Vinyl Me, Please put out an exclusive vinyl pressing of 500 copies that has since sold out. The album itself could now stand testament as a truly inspired work of a young, talented, African American woman in the late 1950s. What became of her afterward, remained a big question mark.
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