Erma Jones had a difficult childhood, her mother often took what were then known as “transportation jobs”, serving on the passenger railroads. Jones was left to be raised largely by Eva Miller’s mother-in-law, Martha Miller, and suffered from her mother’s absences and leaving her in others’ care for much of the first ten years of her life. By the end of 1932 at the age of 17, Erma Jones replaced the singer Monette Moore at a club called Covan’s on West 132nd Street. The producer John Hammond, who loved Monette Moore’s singing and had come to hear her, first heard Jones in early 1933.
