A FAMILY AFFAIR
Johnny Worthy is the fourth generation of his family to work in show business: mother, father, grandfather and great grandfather were all, in various ways and at various times, treaders of the boards...
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In May 1928, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat, based on the book by Edna Ferber, began its first London run at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The cast included a young actress and singer called Bessie Jackson. 43 years later, her son Johnny Worthy was among the cast that opened at the Adelphi Theatre in a revival of the show, starring Cleo Laine and André Jobin; it went on to run for 909 performances.
Bessie Jackson’s father (and Johnny’s grandfather) Ellis Jackson was a member of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, which in 1921, as part of a national tour, played a hugely successful series of concerts at the Dome in Brighton. Pictured above in the Pavilion Gardens, Ellis Jackson is in the second row, fifth from the right. Only a short while afterwards, tragedy struck the SSO: whilst en route from Glasgow to Dublin, their boat, the SS Rowan, was involved in a collision that killed 36 people, including nine members of the orchestra.
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After surviving the wreck of the SS Rowan, Ellis Jackson went on to be a prominent member of Billy Cotton’s Band, playing trombone and tap-dancing.
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Born in New Jersey, Ellis Jackson first visited England in 1905 with his father, the musician Captain Jackson; here he appears as an inset on his father’s passport.
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Like Johnny’s maternal forebears, his father was an American performer who took up residence in England. Along with his partner, the Jamaican Bertie ‘Nightlife’ Jarrett, Johnny Worthy Sr starred in the 1946 film Walking On Air, as well as writing some of the music. The film proved both the pinnacle of the act’s success, and its swan song. Later that year, Worthy was killed in a traffic accident. Jarrett went on to form a partnership with the dancer Charlie Woods.
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Now known as the home of the English National Opera, the Coliseum, in London’s St Martin’s Lane, started out as a variety venue. Johnny Worthy Sr played there in 1945, when Worthy & Jarrett appeared in The Night and the Music, just a little way down the bill from legendary comedy violinist Vic Oliver. A few years later, the Coliseum also played host to JW’s maternal grandfather, Ellis Jackson. Having left Billy Cotton’s band after the war to start a tap school in Brixton, he was seduced back onto the stage in 1951 by the producers of Kiss Me Kate.
