Rebirth
“Her voice is like the music of rain on a slate roof, a gentle sound that floats in the dark of the house on Iowa Avenue, the house where she grew up and lives again now.”
– Dick Kaukas, staff writer for The Courier-Journal, June 30, 1973
In 1973, after Humes had stayed out of the music industry for six years, music critic Stanley Dance persuaded her to appear in a tribute to Count Basie at the Newport Jazz Festival in New York. This began a resurgence in her career, and for the next two years she split her time between performing and recording in New York and Europe and her home life in Louisville.
This newspaper clipping from an unidentified publication describes Humes in her later years as “still tremendous” who “slipped into obscurity.” The legendary jazz critic Nat Hentoff, according to this unidentified source, called Helen “the best female jazz singer now working.”
Humes was working out of town in 1975 when her father passed away.
“Before I left home to do that New Year's Eve party, I went to Pop and I told him, ‘Poppa, Barney wants me to come up there.’ … He said, ‘You go on to New York ‘cause my baby can sing. My baby can really sing.’ I came back a few days later when he died.”
– Helen Humes, as reported by Dianne Aprile, The Louisville Times, n.d.