The Toronto Manleys: Morris Manley, Dolly Sterling, and Mildred “Canada’s Greatest Child Vocalist”
From obscure origins to Vaudeville fame to the Blues — a musical family to remember.
Morris Manley (b. 1875-1877) arrived in Canada as an orphaned or abandoned English child, found a home with farming people in Essex County, and transformed himself — through will, talent, and decades of practice in medicine shows, Grange halls, minor theatres, and finally the great vaudeville circuits of North America — into “Canada’s Greatest Song Writer.” His songs inspired 2,000 people to sing together at Massey Hall. His daughter’s voice carried them.
Dolly Sterling Manley sits at the piano in the background of many of these moments — the accompanist, the booking agent, the business manager, the co-author of Kid Hickey, the woman who managed the enterprise from College Street while Morris composed and Mildred performed, and who also, on her own terms, took herself to Pittsburgh and other Pennsylvania stages, reminding the world that she was a performer in her own right. History has been unkind to her, as it so often is to the women who made things work behind the scenes.
And Mildred — the “Human Doll,” the “ball of fire,” the blonde child who sang about missing her daddy to thousands of weeping strangers at Massey Hall, who grew up to deliver the blues in New York nightclubs and perform works by W.C. Handy, while the audience called her low-down and fascinating — is perhaps the most poignant figure of all. She was marketed as a wonder from the time she could walk; she was placed on Massey Hall’s stage at eight years of age to make audiences weep; her face appeared on sheet music covers before she was old enough to understand what any of it meant. That she emerged from that childhood to build a genuine adult career, to be reviewed seriously on her own terms, to be described as having “arrived,” rather than merely being promising, is itself a kind of triumph.
She died, at about 40 years of age, in Manhattan in February 1949, and was buried from a Brooklyn chapel four days later. Her parents were already gone. Her daughter Linda was 21 years old, and would go on to live another 74 years, eventually dying in 2023 and buried at West Point — a long, long way from College Street, Toronto, and the piano at which Dolly Marshall Manley once sat, accompanying her extraordinary daughter into the light.
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Denise Choppin