queerplaces - Pieternella "Pia" Beck

Queer Places:
The Blue Note, Pje. Gil Vicente, 29620 Torremolinos, Málaga, Spain

Pieternella "Pia" Beck (September 18, 1925 – November 26, 2009) was a jazz pianist and singer. She had a relationship with Marga Samsonowski.

Pieternella "Pia" Beck was into an average middle-class family in The Hague, the daughter of Floor Beck (1886-1960), and Johanna Westerbaan (1895-1984). Early on she showed a talent for music. Later she liked to tell in interviews that she could play all kinds of instruments as a child, to the surprise of those around her. She focused on the piano, but structured music lessons failed because her playing was too unpolished. According to Beck, her teacher, none other than Bernard Haitink, sent her away with the message that she had to try her "unique gypsy talent" elsewhere.

In the war years 1940-1945 Pia Beck created the group 'The Samoa Girls' with her neighbor's daughters: Hertha and Nylka and her sisters Bea and Lonnie. After the war she took a place as a vocalist and pianist in the Miller sextet of Ab Molenaar, which played swing. She performed for American soldiers in Germany, toured around Europe and then performed for Dutch soldiers in Indonesia for six months. In 1949 Pia Beck left the Millers and started her own trio, with which she performed all over the Netherlands in the 1950s. Her music was mainly boogie-woogie – her first hit was also called 'Pia's Boogie'. She played songs from the standard repertoire of American jazz – called the 'jofele genre' – but also German and French songs. Above all, she wanted to entertain and make music for the general public. This made her immensely popular in those years: in her own words, she was 'a nice saleswoman of my own'.

Beck regularly toured Europe and from 1952 she also traveled to the United States, where she enjoyed a certain popularity during the 1950s. She played with many well-known artists and to her not insignificant pride she even made Time magazine once in 1956, which gave her the title 'The Flying Dutchess'. It was also during this time that her lifelong relationship with Marga Samsonowski started. Marga was married to disc jockey Pete Felleman and had three children. In the early 1960s Beck also performed in Las Vegas. Yet she never really broke through in the US, in her own words because she was too homesick for the Netherlands and therefore went home too often. Pia Beck was a 'diva at birth'; she loved a show, drove showy sports cars, of which she wore out 45 according to an interview, and had the allure of a star. In an interview she said: 'I was really a vamp, a star'.

In the early 1960s her popularity began to wane, mainly because with her boogie-woogie she did not find a connection with the changing popular music and her music therefore became dated. Around 1965 Beck changed course. She went to live with Samsonowski, became co-responsible for the upbringing of the children and then left with Samsonowski and children for Torremolinos in Spain. There the star Pia Beck disappeared into anonymity. She had, with varying degrees of success, several ventures there – including a piano bar, the Blue Note, in the Begoña passage in the heart of the Torremolinos, a radio program for Radio Juventud, La Voz de Malaga and later a real estate agency, Pia Beck Commercials, Inmobilaria, and she wrote travel books about the Costa del Sol: “Pia’s Boekie”, “Pia Doet Een Boekje Open Over Spaanse Kusten” and “Pia Over Spanje”. In the Spanish piano bar she still performed, but in the Netherlands she limited her performances to a few times on television, to sell her travel books. In the mid-1970s Pia Beck successfully made her comeback in the Netherlands. She still played the same genre, which now attracted an older audience: people came to listen for nostalgic reasons. In 1977 she caused a furore by participating in actions against the American anti-gay activist Anita Bryant. Beck continued to perform until 2003 – until she was 78 – but became less and less interested in it. Eventually she even put her piano away, although officially because the instrument suffered from the drought of the Spanish climate. She continued to live with her friend and a whole procession of pets in the village of Churriana near Torremolinos. Pia Beck died there on November 26, 2009, a few months after Samsonowski, at the age of 84.

Reputation Pia Beck was a flamboyant diva with great success in the Netherlands, Europe and the United States, with a corresponding lifestyle. At the same time she was enterprising, cheerful and loved by the audience. In interviews, she hinted that the Dutch music world begrudged her the success, something that bothered her. She also showed that she always felt 'Dutch', even though she sang 'in twelve languages, which she did not speak'. Her later popularity was mainly of a nostalgic nature. All in all, her career spanned about fifty years. Pia Beck also has a certain fame for her lesbian orientation, but she never became a figurehead of the gay movement. Her relationship with a woman was still considered something special in the 1950s and 1960s. She was not secretive about it and was eventually willing to act against discrimination, but she thought it was a private matter and kept insisting that her life consisted of more than her sexuality.

Beck wrote two biographies. 1982 De Pia Beck Story and 2000 The Touch of my life (with CD, written with the journalist Henk Krol), where she describes her Spanish time from 1965 from the point of view of her Grotrian-Steinweg grand piano (which she calls Elise Grotrian).

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