Vaughan, Sarah

Source:

 African American National Biography

Vaughan, Sarah

(27 Mar. 1924–3 Apr. 1990),

jazz singer, was born Sarah Lois Vaughan in Newark, New Jersey, to Asbury Vaughan, a carpenter, and Ada Vaughan, a laundress. Her father, who played guitar for pleasure, and her mother, who sang in the choir of the local Mount Zion Baptist Church, gave their only daughter piano lessons from the age of seven. Before her teens Vaughan was playing organ in church and singing in the choir. In 1942, on a dare from a friend, she took the subway into Harlem and entered the Apollo Theatre's legendary Wednesday-night amateur contest. She won the ten-dollar first prize and a week-long spot there as an opening act.

That engagement launched a singer who would soon develop a voice of operatic splendor and an imagination to match. Embraced early on by the pioneers of bebop, “The Divine One,” as she was called, absorbed their innovations and applied them lavishly to the Great American Songbook. Gunther Schuller, the Pulitzer Prize–winning classical conductor and scholar, called Vaughan the greatest vocal artist of the twentieth century: “Hers is a perfect instrument, attached to a musician of superb instincts” (Liska, 19). Unlike her peer Carmen McRae, Vaughan was no probing interpreter of words. She communicated drama through sound, wallowing in a seemingly endless range of textures. In one drawn-out note she could change timbres repeatedly, from dulcet to husky, or make a feathery leap from bass to soprano.

After hearing her sing at the Apollo, crooner Billy Eckstine, a reigning black heartthrob of the day, took her to meet his boss, the pianist and bandleader Earl “Fatha” Hines. Soon Vaughan was sharing the bandstand with Eckstine, as well as bebop pioneers Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who were in Hines's band. “I thought Bird and Diz were the end,” said Vaughan. “Horns always influenced me more than voices” (Gold, 13). But she borrowed a lot from Eckstine, whose voluptuous swoops and overripe vibrato turned up in Vaughan's singing.

Sarah Vaughan sings at Café Society in New York City, c. August 1946. (© William P. Gottlieb; www.jazzphotos.com.)

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In the summer of 1944 Eckstine left Hines to form a groundbreaking bebop orchestra and took Vaughan with him. She made her first recording, “I'll Wait and Pray,” with the band on 5 December 1944. Thereafter she recorded for several small bop labels. But it was clear to George Treadwell, a handsome trumpeter with whom she shared a bill in 1946, that Vaughan's voice had commercial potential. After a brief courtship, they wed on 17 September of that year. Treadwell became her manager, investing thousands of dollars on a makeover for his wife, including a nose job, teeth straightening, and gowns.

Also in 1946, a glamorized Vaughan joined a new label, Musicraft. In 1947 her luscious cover version of Doris Day's hit “It's Magic” climbed to number 11. The next year she covered Nat King Cole's “Nature Boy,” reaching number 9. Every year from 1947 through 1952 she won Down Beat's poll as best female jazz singer; through 1959 she had twenty-six Top Forty singles.

Vaughan's straddling of jukebox pop and modern jazz tended to frustrate both worlds. She went on the defense. “I'm not a jazz singer, I'm a singer,” she said, while naming a wide range of favorite colleagues, from Mahalia Jackson to Polly Bergen (Liska, 21). In a fruitful relationship with Columbia from 1949 to 1953, Vaughan recorded show tunes, saccharin torch songs like “My Tormented Heart,” and a now-classic LP with Miles Davis.

In 1954 she signed a dual contract with a pop label, Mercury, and its jazz subsidiary, EmArcy. Among the jazz milestones she created is Sarah Vaughan, a 1954 small-group album that teamed her with a bebop wunderkind, trumpeter Clifford Brown. Vaughan gained a new trademark in 1958 when she recorded “Misty,” the Erroll Garner–Johnny Burke ballad, with a twinkly, sugar-dusted arrangement credited to Quincy Jones. Her commercial stature rose as she recorded a series of kitschy hits, notably “Broken-Hearted Melody” (1959), a country-pop ditty with a heavy backbeat and a male chorus singing “doomp-do-doomp” behind her. “God, I hated it,” she said later. “It's the corniest thing I ever did” (Liska, 21). Yet it reached number 7 and lifted her into a glamorous rank of white supper clubs. Vaughan even appeared in a 1960 gangster film, Murder Inc.

Also in 1960 Vaughan accepted a lucrative offer from Roulette, a gangster-run rock and jazz label. Through 1963 she created some of her best-loved work at Roulette: late-night jazz with guitar and bass (After Hours and Sarah+2) and sessions with the Benny Carter and Count Basie orchestras. But she also made a series of string-laden ballad discs, and jazz purists continued to attack her. The grumbling rose during her second stint at Mercury, from 1963 to 1967. Vaughan later claimed that she quit the label, citing various grievances: she hated the pop material, the records were not promoted, and she was not getting royalties. She did not record again until 1971.

Vaughan's luck with men was not much better. Having divorced Treadwell in 1956—she claimed that all he had done for her had been for himself—Vaughan had taken on a new husband-manager in 1959: Clyde “C. B.” Atkins, a former professional football player who now owned a Chicago taxi fleet. In 1961 the couple adopted a child, Deborah (now Paris Vaughan, an actress). Divorcing the violent Atkins in the 1960s, Vaughan found he had left her in heavy debt to the Internal Revenue Service. From 1970 through 1977 she had a more pleasant relationship with Marshall Fisher, a restaurateur who became her manager. But when asked in an interview about the men in her life, an angry Vaughan threatened to “throw up” (O'Connor, 96).

Vaughan's career gained new life when she signed with Mainstream, a jazz label run by Bob Shad, her producer at EmArcy. She made more blatant pop albums, along with Live in Japan, a double LP of Vaughan singing the standards she loved with a first-rate trio, and Sarah Vaughan with Michel Legrand, a sumptuous orchestral collaboration with the celebrated French composer-arranger. For the rest of her life Vaughan was a touring machine, second only to Ella Fitzgerald as a living legend of vocal jazz. No longer did she record fluff. From 1977 through 1982 she made a series of uncompromising jazz albums for the Pablo label. These included Send in the Clowns (1982), Vaughan's third LP with the Count Basie Orchestra. The title song, from Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, was her key showstopper of later years. Singing the lament of an actress who has triumphed onstage but not in love, the shy and private Vaughan gave a rare flash of autobiography. She delivered the song as a slow, emotional aria, lingering on the words, “Sure of my lines / No one is there.” Returning to Columbia, she recorded the Grammy Award–winning Gershwin Live (1982), a symphonic program she performed for years.

By now Vaughan had ended another marriage, to trumpeter Waymon Reed. Though sixteen years her junior, he died of cancer in 1983. Vaughan herself had smoked, drunk, and snorted cocaine for decades, with little audible damage. Her 1987 album, Brazilian Romance, proved this. But in 1989, soon after she won a Grammy for lifetime achievement, Vaughan was diagnosed with lung cancer. That October she returned to the Blue Note jazz club, her New York headquarters of the 1980s, for what would be her final performances. On 3 April 1990, one week after turning sixty-six, she died at her home in Hidden Hills, a Los Angeles suburb.

All of Vaughan's Mercury recordings are available in four box sets; her Roulette sides are gathered in The Complete Roulette Sarah Vaughan Studio Sessions (Mosaic). In 1991 the Public Broadcasting System aired a television documentary on Vaughan, The Divine One, as part of its American Masters series. In 2002 singer Dianne Reeves won a Grammy for her tribute album to Vaughan, The Calling. Reeves explained: “I'd never heard a voice like that, that was so rich and deep and beautiful, just sang all over the place. I thought, ‘You mean, there are those kinds of possibilities?’” (Interview with author, 2000).

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