Sarah Vaughan

Sarah Lois Vaughan was born in Newark, New Jersey, on the twenty-seventh of March 1924, the daughter of a Baptist deacon and a laundress. She sang in her father's Mount Zion Baptist Church choir from age seven and studied piano formally from twelve.

She won the amateur-night contest at the Apollo Theater on the twenty-first of November 1942 — eight years to the day after Ella Fitzgerald had won the same contest. Earl Hines hired her into his big band the following year on the recommendation of Billy Eckstine, who heard her at the Apollo. She thus became, in 1943, the only female member of the small group within the Hines band — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie (also placed in this archive), Eckstine, and others — that would, three years later, found bebop. Vaughan's vocal style was shaped from the inside by that group's harmonic innovations.

Her range across three and a half octaves, her formal classical-piano training, her control over chromatic alteration, and the dark contralto timbre she produced across the lower registers made her the most harmonically sophisticated jazz vocalist of the twentieth century. Her recordings — particularly Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown (1954), Sassy Swings the Tivoli (1963), and the late-career Brazilian Romance (1987) — established the technical floor that subsequent jazz vocalists were measured against.

She received the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Award in 1989 and four Grammy Awards. Her live performances continued through 1989; the final concert was at the Blue Note in New York in October 1989.

She died of lung cancer at her home in Hidden Hills, California, on the third of April 1990, age sixty-six.

She is honored here as the singer whose musical training set the technical ceiling of jazz vocal art.