Her name was Esther Lee Jones.
She performed as Baby Esther.
She was probably born around 1918. She was from Chicago. By the time she was a young girl she was already working nightclub stages in Harlem — singing, dancing, performing acrobatics — billed as “The Miniature Florence Mills.”
She had a style unlike anything the mainstream had heard.
A baby-voiced scat. Playful syllables — boo-boo-boo, doo-doo-doo, boop-boop-a-doop — delivered with childlike mischief and the kind of comic timing that only comes from a performer who has studied her audience and knows exactly what she is doing.
She was a child. She was brilliant. She was Black.
And then — in the way that has happened to Black women’s creativity across generations — the style traveled. The name did not.
Harlem — The World She Came From
To understand Esther Lee Jones you have to understand Harlem in the 1920s.
It was the center of the Harlem Renaissance. A dense, alive ecosystem of Black art, music, literature, and performance — shaped by segregated venues, Prohibition nightlife, and the complicated reality of white audiences flooding into Black spaces like the Cotton Club to consume Black artistry while Black patrons were often turned away at the door.
Black performers in that world navigated a double reality every single night. Creative flowering and rigid racial hierarchy. Artistic genius and economic exploitation. The freedom to invent and the impossibility of truly owning what you invented.
Baby Esther was inside all of that.
Her manager Lou Bolton booked her into venues across Chicago, Harlem, and New York. By early 1928 she was performing at the Everglades Club in midtown Manhattan — a girl with a baby voice, a scat style, and a stage presence that made grown audiences stop and pay attention.
Witnesses described her performances in detail. The high childlike voice. The nonsensical syllables woven through popular songs. The playful facial expressions. The acrobatic movements. The contrast between her youth and her complete command of a sophisticated nightclub room.
She was not imitating anyone.
She was the original.
The Style That Traveled
In 1928 — the same year Baby Esther was performing at the Everglades Club — a white singer named Helen Kane began using a baby-voiced scat style in her recordings and stage performances. Her signature phrase: boop-oop-a-doop.
Kane became a star. Her baby-talk jazz style made her famous.
Then Max Fleischer and Fleischer Studios created a cartoon character — a nightclub singer with a flapper dress, big eyes, a heart-shaped mouth, and a baby voice.
They called her Betty Boop.
Betty Boop first appeared on screen in 1930. By 1932 she was one of the most recognizable cartoon characters in America. Her voice — delivered by Mae Questel — was patterned directly on Helen Kane’s style.
And Helen Kane’s style — as a 1934 courtroom would reveal — did not originate with Helen Kane.
The Courtroom — What the Record Shows
In May 1932 Helen Kane filed a $250,000 lawsuit against Max Fleischer, Fleischer Studios, and Paramount Pictures. Her claim: the Betty Boop cartoons had stolen her unique boop-oop-a-doop style and baby-voice persona without permission.
It was in this courtroom that Esther Lee Jones entered the historical record.
Lou Bolton — Baby Esther’s manager — testified that he had been present when Helen Kane attended Baby Esther’s performance at the Everglades Club in April 1928. He testified that Kane sat ringside and watched Esther’s act. He described the baby-talk scat syllables he had coached Esther to use — syllables that predated Kane’s public use of similar sounds.
A short sound film of Baby Esther performing was screened in the courtroom — showing a Black child singer using a baby-voiced scat style with syllables similar to Kane’s signature phrase.
The New York Times covered the trial. On May 2, 1934 the paper reported that testimony had traced the boop style to earlier performances by a “negro girl” — whose act predated Kane’s use of those sounds.
On May 5, 1934 — Justice Edward J. McGoldrick dismissed Helen Kane’s lawsuit.
Kane had failed to prove that her style was original to her. The court found that similar sounds had been used by others before her.
Baby Esther’s act had been used to deny Helen Kane ownership of a style.
But the court did not give that ownership to Esther Lee Jones.
It gave it to no one.
What the Law Would Not Do
This is where the story gets complicated — and where honesty matters.
The 1934 ruling did not legally name Esther Lee Jones as the creator of Betty Boop. The court’s finding was narrow: Kane could not prove she owned the style. That was all.
In 1934 United States law offered almost no protection for what a Black child performer carried in her body and her voice. There was no robust right of publicity. No framework that recognized a vocal style or performance persona as property. No legal mechanism that could take what was established in that courtroom — that Esther’s style predated Kane’s — and turn it into acknowledged authorship or compensation.
The law used her presence to answer a white performer’s question.
Then it let her name disappear.
Some historians argue the connection between Baby Esther and Betty Boop is clear and direct — that Esther’s style moved from her performances to Helen Kane’s act to the Fleischer Studios cartoon. Animation historian Charles Solomon has documented that the Fleischers won the case by proving Baby Esther used the phrase before Kane or Mae Questel.
Other scholars urge caution. Film scholar Mark Langer argued that the Baby Esther film shown in court was “hardly proof that Helen Kane derived her singing style from Baby Esther.” Jazz scholar Robert O’Meally suggested the film might have been framed by the Fleischers themselves to weaken Kane’s claim — noting that the studio later acknowledged Kane was their model for Betty Boop.
Fleischer Studios today publicly honors Esther Lee Jones as “the unsung and uncredited inspiration behind Betty Boop.”
What the historical record gives us is this:
A Black child performer in Harlem used a baby-voiced scat style before Helen Kane made it famous. That style — filtered through a white singer and a white-owned animation studio — became one of the most recognizable cartoon characters in American history. Esther Lee Jones appears in a 1934 courtroom as evidence in someone else’s lawsuit. And then her name slips away from the public record so completely that the date of her death is unknown.
What This Story Exposes
Baby Esther’s story did not happen in isolation.
It happened inside a system.
The Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s was structured to extract Black artistry while limiting Black ownership. Clubs like the Cotton Club featured Black performers for white audiences under tight white management. Pay was controlled. Publicity was controlled. What got recorded, distributed, and credited was controlled.
Black performers’ vocal styles, dance moves, and performance innovations flowed continuously into mainstream American culture during this era — and the originators’ names were continuously removed. White bands recorded jazz and blues created by Black artists. White singers adopted Black vocal styles. White studios animated Black creative energy into characters that would generate wealth for generations.
Baby Esther was not the exception to this pattern.
She was an example of it.
The specific wound her story carries — the wound that research on psychological ownership and creative erasure confirms is real and deep — is this:
She did not just lose credit.
She was used as evidence and then forgotten.
Her creativity was precise enough and documented enough to deny a white performer’s legal claim. But not protected enough — not valued enough by the law or the culture — to be named as the author of what she had created.
That is a particular kind of erasure. Not simple invisibility. Active use without acknowledgment.
What Her Life Says to You
If you have ever created something — a style, a sound, a way of moving through the world — and watched it get picked up by someone else without your name attached to it —
You know something about what Esther Lee Jones carried.
If you have ever been used as evidence in someone else’s argument and then dismissed when the argument was over —
You know something about what the 1934 courtroom did.
If you have ever been a Black woman whose voice, whose body, whose way of being in the world was consumed and celebrated in a form that did not include your name —
Baby Esther’s story is not history.
It is a mirror.
What she carried was real. What she created was real. The fact that the system did not build a structure to protect it does not mean it was not hers.
It was hers.
And in the way that truth has of surviving even when institutions bury it — her story survived. Fragments of it. Court documents. Newspaper archives. Testimony from people who sat ringside and watched a child do something no one else was doing.
Enough to know she existed.
Enough to know she mattered.
Enough to ask — out loud, in a place where people can actually hear it — the question that the courts never answered and the studios never fully addressed:
The Question Only You Can Answer
You have read the research.
You know what the 1934 courtroom established — and what it did not.
You know that a Black child performer in Harlem used a baby-voiced scat style before Helen Kane made it famous.
You know that style — filtered through a white singer and a white animation studio — became Betty Boop.
You know that Esther Lee Jones’s name disappeared from the story while the style she helped create became an American icon.
Now you decide.
Do you think Esther Lee Jones was the real inspiration behind one of America’s most famous cartoon characters of all time?
The answer belongs to you.
Not to a courtroom.
Not to a studio.
Not to a history that has already proven it cannot always be trusted to remember Black women’s names.
To you. 💎
If You Need Support Right Now
You are not alone.
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- The Steve Fund (young people of color): Text STEVE to 741741
Esther Lee Jones — “Baby Esther” — born approximately 1918, Chicago. Scat singer. Dancer. Acrobat. Harlem performer. Her voice predated the fame. Her name did not survive it. The courts used her. The culture forgot her. We remember her now.
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