We are very fortunate to have many wonderful singers in America but only a few of these singers attract other singers. Sarah Vaughan is a singer’s singer and a musician’s singer,” said Lady Bird Johnson as she introduced Vaughan in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday, January 12, 1965.1 President and First Lady Johnson had invited Vaughan and her trio to play at a state dinner honoring the prime minister of Japan, Eisaku Sato. The dinner marked the conclusion of diplomatic talks between the two countries—a celebration of their goodwill and shared desire to improve the world through technology, research, scholarship, and the arts. That night, Vaughan represented the United States’ cultural and artistic achievements.
It was her first performance at the White House, and it came during a stressful time in her personal life. She was in the final weeks of her messy, prolonged divorce from Atkins, and it was only days before her scheduled court appearance for his trumped-up burglary charges. Earlier in the day, she and her trio rehearsed. In the evening Vaughan attended the formal dinner, sitting patiently through the gift exchanges, toasts, and idle banter. After the meal, as the president and his guests made their way from the State Dining Room to the East Room, Vaughan excused herself. She changed from a beige lace gown into a beaded gold crepe purchased for the evening, walked to the East Room, and waited for the now-familiar praise of Lady Bird’s introduction. She climbed the steps onto the small stage, positioned herself next to the famous Steinway grand piano with carvings of bald eagles on its legs, and sang the Japanese folksong “Sakura.” It was a musical ode to cherry blossoms chosen by the first lady to commemorate Japan’s generosity and gift of the now-iconic cherry blossoms to Washington, D.C., in 1912.
I knew that song perfectly when I sang it this afternoon but I must admit that tonight I goofed on a few words,” she confessed.2 Pianist Bob James remembered how nervous Vaughan was during both the rehearsal and the concert. “I knew her well enough, having done a lot of shows with her, to know when she was nervous and when she wasn’t,” he said. “She was quite nervous on that performance day.” The enormity of the occasion aside, singing in the East Room was not like working a club or theater. It more closely resembled a living room. It was well lit, and the audience sat in chairs just feet away. Vaughan could see the president and first lady, prime minister, vice president, secretary of state, dozens of other influential politicians and dignitaries, and celebrities like Alfred Hitchcock. “If we were in a jazz club or wherever we would be around the world, in her world, she’s totally comfortable and confident,” explained James. It didn’t matter if there were other jazz superstars, celebrities, or fans. “In this setting it was not a jazz environment, it was the upper social strata, [and] that, I know, contributed to her nervousness on that occasion.”3 Vaughan did, however, settle into her performance. After overcoming the hurdle of “Sakura,” with its unfamiliar lyrics and unusual pentatonic scale, she sang six of her staples and, as she had fifteen years earlier at the supper club in Miami Beach where she sang “The Lord’s Prayer” a cappella, she concluded with a spiritual. As Vaughan sang “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” she reminded her audience, full of some of the most powerful men in the world, not only of her range as a vocalist but also that her art was rooted in the aesthetics and practices of the black church, her experiences as a black American. This was black music in the White House.
After her set, Vaughan and her trio took pictures with the president, prime minister, and first lady and joined the party. “At one point in the evening, late after dinner, we saw this tall guy coming over to our table where Sarah and my trio were all seated.” James continued, “The big tall guy was Lyndon Johnson coming over to ask Sarah to dance. Of course, Sarah was nervous and extremely excited and proceeded to go up on the dance floor with Lyndon Johnson.” As James, who had just turned twenty-five, watched Vaughan dance, he realized he might not have an opportunity like this again, so he followed Vaughan’s lead and mustered up the courage to ask Lady Bird to dance. “I had my moment, dancing with the first lady, and it was fantastic, which I will never forget.”4
“When we were dancing afterward it was just one big happy family—everybody was cutting in on everybody else. Still, I don’t think that I’ve ever been so nervous in my life,” Vaughan told Down Beat’s Bill Quinn in 1967. “When I danced with Mr. Johnson, I was so tense and stiff that he sort of shook me and asked me what the matter was. I explained that I was nervous and he said, ‘Put your head on my shoulder and forget about it.’ I just died.”5
Then Vaughan disappeared. “I found her in this office, which had been turned over to her as a dressing room, and she was sobbing,” recalled Bess Abell, President Johnson’s White House social secretary. “And I said, ‘Mrs. Vaughan, what’s wrong? What can I do?’ And she said, ‘There’s nothing wrong. This is the most wonderful day of my life. When I first came to Washington, I couldn’t get a hotel room and tonight, I danced with the president.’”6
It was a moment of personal triumph and satisfaction. A reminder of how much she, a choir girl from Newark and a black woman born into a racist country, had endured. Being relegated to the balconies of Newark’s segregated theaters as a girl. Instructed to look but not touch as her fellow musicians in the Hines band shopped for new uniforms in Philadelphia because blacks were not allowed to try on clothes before purchasing them. Enduring the sooty, terribly hot, and overcrowded Jim Crow car on trains as she toured with the Hines and Eckstine bands. Turned away from white hotels and restaurants and being forced instead to find accommodations on the other side of the tracks, in black communities. Pooling her money with fellow musicians to hire a cab between sets at the Copacabana because the club did not have dressing rooms for its black talent and forbade mingling with white guests. Being chased and beaten by an angry white gang after her shift at Café Society Downtown because they didn’t want blacks in their neighborhood. And years later, even after she became a star, exiting through the kitchens of hotels in Miami Beach and Las Vegas because blacks were banned from staying there. She had endured all of this, and on the merits of her talent now found herself performing for a president and prime minister. It was a moment of validation and acknowledgment of her immense talent.
It was also a reminder of the larger social, political, and cultural changes happening in the country. Despite his Texas roots and the not-so-closeted racism in his personal life, President Johnson pursued the civil rights agenda set out by John F. Kennedy before his assassination. Applying the same charm he used to put Vaughan at ease, combined with a deft political savvy, Johnson persuaded reluctant southern conservatives to pass the Civil Rights Act. Signed into law on July 2, 1964, the bill outlawed discrimination based upon race, religion, nationality, and gender; curbed unfair voter registration practices; and ended racial segregation in schools and workplaces serving the general public. It was now illegal to deny service to black Americans in hotels, restaurants, theaters, and stores. Many of the slights and racial injustices experienced by Vaughan and her black contemporaries had been outlawed.
Yet the legacy of racism, its social customs, mind-sets, and institutions, persisted, and Vaughan still encountered prejudice every day. “I know that she was feeling it, the prejudice that was going on all around her,” said James. And it must have taken its toll. Because she was black, she was not afforded the same opportunities as her white counterparts, despite her tremendous talent. Had she been white, she likely would have had radio and television shows that she then parlayed into a movie career, just like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, and Rosemary Clooney had done. Given the range, quality, and power of her voice, she could have been an opera singer, but because she was black and poor, without a wealthy benefactor, this path was off-limits too. “I know she had a big love for classical music and legitimacy, what the legitimacy of being an opera singer would have meant,” said James. “She knew that she had the instrument vocally to be able to do it, and occasionally she would use it in a way that almost was saying that ‘I could do that if I wanted to, just change the repertoire from Gershwin to Verdi and it’d be okay.’ So that desire to be legitimate, to be appreciated for the depth of her talent was very deep in her. She lived in a social era in which that kind of recognition was not always there.” In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, jazz and other forms of black creative expression simply were not respected in the same way as classical music, the ultimate highbrow music. Black music was undervalued and marginalized, especially when practiced by a black artist. “There was a lot of prejudice around in our field,” James reiterated, concluding, “I can only speak to the purity of her passion for music and how it just resonated every time she performed.”7
Although Vaughan had gained the admiration of world leaders and become a symbol of American cultural and artistic achievement, she still had to fight to be respected by her record labels, both in and out of the studio. By the spring of 1963, she had lost patience with Roulette Records. During her three years at the label, Vaughan recorded thirteen full-length albums, including the classics After Hours and Sarah + 2, not to mention multiple collaborations with Count Basie. Her single “Serenata” spent six weeks at the bottom of Billboard’s Top 100 chart in 1960, and she released another thirty-three singles, enough to fill three albums. But Vaughan had barely seen any royalties for her efforts, and once again she felt exploited. It had become common knowledge that Morris Levy and Roulette had mob affiliations, and in 1986 he was indicted on three counts of racketeering and extortion. He had been working under Vincent Gigante and the Genovese crime family since before 1963.8
Vaughan turned to her friend the trumpeter, bandleader, arranger, and now producer Quincy Jones. He was nine years Vaughan’s junior, and in their early collaborations, Vaughan took Jones under her wing and mentored him. They first worked together in 1958 on Vaughan and Violins for Mercury, then again in 1962 on You’re Mine You for Roulette.9 In 1961 Jones became a vice president of A&R at Mercury Records, the first African American executive at a major label. And during the spring and summer of 1963, he facilitated Vaughan’s departure from Roulette and return, later that summer, to Mercury.
“I could record anything I wanted to,” said Vaughan while discussing the early years following her return to Mercury in 1963 with Down Beat’s Quinn.10 Jones was her producer, and with his bebop roots, he not only understood how Vaughan worked and what she needed to thrive creatively; he also respected her as a musician. “She’s a very sensitive chick,” he explained in a 1965 installment of “The Quincy Jones Column,” distributed by the Associated Negro Press. She absorbed everything in her sonic environment—the bustle of the audience, studio technicians, musicians, and ambient noises like the hum of a light or birdsongs, not to mention every detail of a song: its lyrics, harmonic language, and arrangement. “She thinks just like a violin: if everything isn’t smooth from base line to harmonies (she can check them all simultaneously) it’s impossible for her to tune out and concentrate on the sound that’s made her one of the greatest female vocalists in the world,” Jones continued. “She’s got to be free from any diversions; be free to just sing, to get that certain sound of hers.”11
“If I put her in the studio with a good song and a great arrangement, then Sarah is really free,” explained Jones in another essay. “And that’s what she likes. I’ve said that Sarah responds to arrangements. She’s a very sensitive creature. Some singers have their thing and just blast ahead regardless of what’s going on around them. But not Sarah. She uses her voice the way a great jazz musician plays his instrument. I’ll tell you, a chick like Sarah makes it all worthwhile. She takes all the pain out of the business, makes up for the dues you’ve paid. The session will be a ball.”12
After their first outing, Sassy Swings the Tivoli, recorded live during her appearances at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen in July 1963, Jones and Vaughan prepared for their first studio sessions together since 1958. Jones paired her with Robert Farnon, whom he considered “one of the greatest string arrangers to ever live.”13 Farnon had been writing for the sixteen-voice Svend Saaby Choir in Copenhagen and suggested including them on the album, which would become known as Vaughan and Voices. “That was one of my favorite albums that I’ve made,” Vaughan said to Les Tomkins more than a decade later, in 1977. The combination of strings and orchestra created a rich sonic palette over which Vaughan mixed and blended her voice, not to mention an almost operatic sense of high drama. “Oh, I love [Robert Farnon],” she said.14 The album Sarah Vaughan Sings the Mancini Songbook, a collection of songs by the still relatively unknown Henri Mancini, and ¡Viva! Vaughan, their take on the bossa nova craze, both followed in 1964. Vaughan’s and Jones’s recordings together, even their commercial singles, were well produced and well sung, a testament to the artistic integrity of Vaughan and Jones. But they didn’t sell.
“There were two guys on the Mercury A&R staff that were real musicians, Hal Mooney and myself,” Jones explained. “And we always got jeered at because we were making records like Julius Watkins with eight French horns [French Horns for My Lady], and Robert Farnon with Sarah Vaughan. We’d sell, like, 1100 records. We really had to take a lot of shit at those A&R meetings.” His colleagues, working with hit makers like Roger Miller, Ray Stevens, and the Angels, accused Jones and Mooney of being “budget busters.” In the span of a decade, Vaughan, once a key player in Mercury’s commercial success and the prestige of their jazz label, was now a budget buster. The music industry was shifting, and jazz musicians and balladeers like Vaughan were increasingly out of sync with the new youth-oriented market. “So it was a challenge to keep the people that I loved; I saw that I had to generate some sales in some other place so we could keep the Sarah Vaughan thing going. And the first one we did with Lesley Gore did it.” “It’s My Party” made the sixteen-year-old Gore an overnight pop sensation in 1963.15
In early 1965, however, Jones shifted focus and moved to Hollywood to write film scores. “After Quincy Jones left, there was nothing,” Vaughan lamented to Down Beat’s Bill Quinn while describing the final two years of her Mercury contract.16 With her strongest advocate and musical kindred spirit gone, she was once again subject to the whims of producers obsessed with the bottom line. They abandoned the sophistication of Vaughan singing jazz or serious pop with classical, often operatic inflections in favor of commercial, middlebrow pop. The results were dreadful. Her next two albums, Pop Artistry from 1965 and The New Scene a year later, rehashed Top 40 material popularized by others. Her cover of “A Lover’s Concerto,” a schmaltzy ballad based on Bach’s Minuet in G, made a brief appearance on the Billboard charts during the spring of 1966; otherwise, the new material fell flat. And Vaughan, once a trendsetter, now chased fads. “There was a lot of commercial pressure from the management and from the record label for her to do more pop stuff,” explained pianist James. “I even remember vaguely some of the range of stuff we brought in and the material that she was being asked to do that she wasn’t really all too enthusiastic about, sometimes very unenthusiastic about it.”17 The sessions were reminiscent of her struggles with producer Mitch Miller fifteen years earlier.
Vaughan had gained a reputation as an artist who could save bad songs from oblivion and salvage subpar, often overwrought arrangements. Guided by her exceptional instincts, musical knowledge, and phenomenal instrument, she infused songs with her wry sense of humor, carefully selecting notes as she reworked cumbersome melodies or improvised new ones, and, of course, added her trademark vocal swoops, slides, and inflections. While Jones respected and facilitated Vaughan’s musicality and creative flights of fancy, his successors did not. They viewed her need to explore and embellish as a “problem” rather than an opportunity. One A&R man “solved the Sarah Vaughan problem” by giving her unfamiliar material, usually the day of the session so that she didn’t have time to rehearse (even when she asked for lead sheets in advance), then rushing to get his final take before she had a chance to explore. It was a deliberate move to stifle her creativity, to limit and contain her, and, once again, to exploit her for financial gain. Critic Martin Williams, a fierce advocate of Vaughan, decried it as “an appalling denigration of a great talent and potential.”18
During her final pop sessions for Mercury, Vaughan did sing straight, for the most part, but the results were uninspired, lacking the usual polish Vaughan, a perfectionist, demanded of herself. And they were still highly stylized, often mannered, covers of the day’s mediocre pop hits. She sounded more and more like her imitators and was at risk of becoming a parody of her former self. “I might suggest that if she keeps up this kind of inhibited and stylized performing much longer, her voice may be gone and she won’t be able to sound like anyone except her imitators,” Williams advised in 1968.19
And Williams was in awe of Vaughan’s voice. “Her voice has range, body, volume. More important, her control of her voice is phenomenal. Her pitch is just about impeccable, and she can jump the most difficult intervals and land true. No other singer has such an effortless command of dynamics,” he gushed in 1967, twenty-five years after Vaughan ventured onto the Apollo’s stage for amateur night. “For Sarah Vaughan is in several respects the jazz singer par excellence, and therefore she can do things with her voice that a [classically] trained singer knows simply must not be done. She can take a note at the top of her range and then bend it or squeeze it; she growls and rattles notes down at the bottom of her range; she can glide her voice through several notes at midrange while raising dynamics, or lowering, or simply squeezing.” For Williams, Vaughan had “one of the most remarkable voices that any of our popular singers has ever possessed,” unrivaled even by her contemporaries on the opera and concert stages.20
Yet the popular music of the day, the Top 40 hits favored by Mercury and other record labels, simply could not hold up to the force of Vaughan’s voice, talent, or creative ambitions. Unlike the tunes of the newly christened American songbook composed in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s by Tin Pan Alley composers and canonized by Ella Fitzgerald’s landmark, and very popular, series of songbook albums produced by Norman Granz for Verve, most pop songs of the 1960s and into the 1970s and 1980s lacked the harmonic sophistication, rhythmic nuance, or lyrical wit to accommodate Vaughan. They could not support her spontaneous improvisations and creative flights of fancy or her need to explore and test the limits of her voice. Contemporary songs could not bear the weight of Vaughan’s creative vision, nor could they contain her. Even when thwarted by unsupportive record producers, she worked to defy expectations and transcend musical boundaries. And time and again she burst through, venturing far out onto the creative precipice.
“I dare say that what Sarah Vaughan needs from an A&R man is the chance to record material with which she is familiar enough so that she can go just as far out as she wants and use all of the remarkable vocal resources she has,” Williams wrote in a 1968 appeal to the music industry. He continued, asserting that Vaughan also needed to be challenged and stimulated by a wide variety of accompaniments, ranging from the intimacy of her trio to the grandeur of a full-scale orchestra. She needed a composer not only familiar with her voice, comedic wit, and dramatic flair, but one who also possessed “the boldness to break through the conventions of popular song and even blues form for her.” Williams believed that Vaughan’s talent called for a secular oratorio or opera composed specifically for her. And under these circumstances, she would shine, revealing a creativity and skill previously unheard. “But in any case,” he concluded, “the last thing in the world Sarah Vaughan needs is another would be ‘hit record’ which shows a tenth of her talent.”21
No A&R men rose to Williams’s challenge. Mercury did not renew Vaughan’s contract when it expired in the spring of 1967, and for the first time since 1946 Vaughan was without a record contract. Without a steady stream of new releases to keep her in the public imagination, her career was at risk. But Vaughan was not the only jazz musician struggling. In 1966, Ella Fitzgerald’s contract with MGM, who acquired Verve in 1960, expired, and in 1967 Norman Granz retired, leaving her without a manager and like-minded producer. She was soon picked up by other labels, but the results were mixed at best. She sang gospel, country music, religious Christmas songs, and, like Vaughan, covers of mediocre contemporary hits. Vaughan’s old compatriots Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Count Basie, and Dizzy Gillespie all struggled too.
“I was, as far as I’m concerned, associated with a terrible record company. All we did was make records—I mean that the company didn’t get behind my records and push—there was no promotion,” she told Quinn in July 1967, six months after her final session at Mercury. Vaughan understood the power of promotion and knew that if a record company really wanted a hit, they could get one if they spent the money. And unlike 1954 and 1955, when Mercury put the full force of the label behind her to launch EmArcy and make her a pop star with the hits “Make Yourself Comfortable” and “Whatever Lola Wants,” and 1959, when she broke through again with “Broken-Hearted Melody,” by 1967 Vaughan was no longer a priority. “I’m happy to say that I’m no longer with them—I’m free,” she said, and when asked what she planned to do next, she simply replied, “Sing.”22
When Preach’ came to me, I was in a bad situation,” Vaughan reflected during the same interview with Bill Quinn in 1967, almost five years after escaping from the abuses of C. B. Atkins. “My second husband had been my manager for some time—I think he was managing himself, not me—and I owed a lot of taxes and other bills. Preach’ took over, and now I don’t owe Uncle Sam a dime.” Clyde Golden, a friend of Wells’s who soon joined the couple’s inner circle, speculated that Vaughan was $150,000 in debt when she and Wells met in 1962. “Preacher put her back on her feet financially,” said Golden. “I could be in the poor house right now,” Vaughan confessed. “But, thanks to Preach’, I don’t have to worry about people wanting money under the table for this and that. I can sing better now because I have no problems; I’m free, single, and 21—and it’s a damn good feeling.”23
Vaughan, as she always did, remained loyal and publicly praised Wells, giving him her unconditional endorsement, as she had with both Treadwell and Atkins before him. Yet unlike Treadwell and Atkins, Vaughan never publicly referred to Wells as her romantic partner. During their years together, she recast her personal story, replacing the sensationalism and domestic fairy tales of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s with stories of her professional accomplishments. On the rare occasions that Vaughan did discuss her personal life, she focused on her role as a mother and daughter. In public, Wells remained her manager, working diligently behind the scenes. “If anything ever happened to Preach’, I think that I’d just leave the business,” she said in 1967. “I’m sure I couldn’t replace him.”24
Vaughan’s musicians saw things differently. They viewed Wells as a nuisance to be tolerated, someone they had to put up with because he controlled the money and paid their salaries. Bassist Buster Williams joined the band in July 1963, when Vaughan’s relationship with Wells was still new. He quickly saw that Wells was an opportunist. “He was from Newark and he was street-smart. Sometimes you would call somebody like that a hustler,” Williams explained. “He always had beautiful clothes, and I never felt that he had Sarah Vaughan’s interest uppermost in his heart. I always felt that it was more about his interest.”25 He used his status as Vaughan’s manager for financial gain, but also to bolster his personal status and importance. “When Sarah was working, he would talk about himself,” said bassist Herb Mickman, who joined the trio in 1965, a year after Williams left to play for vocalist Nancy Wilson. “He’d say, ‘We’re going to Las Vegas, I’m going to be in Las Vegas.’ He never said ‘Sarah’s going to be there.’ In other words, that’s how he talked all the time. Like it was his [accomplishment]. And he was just the manager and the lover. He wasn’t on the stage or anything.”26
“[Preacher] carried a gun, and he was very good about the money. He got the money on every job,” said Mickman. Wells wore his gun in a holster, under his jacket. “We’d work a club, and we did maybe two nights and he’d come in the office where the manager of the club was, and he had his jacket open so you could see his gun and he’d say, ‘I need some money for the two nights.’” The threat of violence was understood. Vaughan had been burned in the past, and Wells made sure it didn’t happen again.27
Guns, and the violence they represented, had been a constant since her days with the Hines and Eckstine bands. Back then, many musicians carried guns to protect themselves from the physical threats of racism, especially while touring the South. Vaughan described the Eckstine band, in particular, as being very rough and rowdy. And Eckstine, who considered Vaughan a little sister, said that he would “whip her ass” when she stepped out of line.28 Now, more than twenty years later, this tough-guy mentality still permeated the business. It’s likely that the roughness and volatility Wells displayed in clubs seeped into his dealings with Vaughan offstage and behind closed doors. “I was naive and I personally didn’t have any bad experiences that left me with extreme bitterness, and I shied away from getting involved in any of the worst of that stuff which I realized later was probably going on the whole time,” said pianist James. “He was beating up on us,” James explained, referring to the low salaries set by Wells. “Naturally I’m sure he did hit her too. He was a tough guy.”29 Buster Williams agreed. “She always picked the wrong men and they beat her, they cheated her and they demeaned her. It was really, really, really sickening to see. I saw some of that. And it’s infamous,” he said. “But this was her man, and I sure had nothing to do with it. And I’ll tell you this: he always gave me what I needed.”30
“I knew both sides of him. [Wells] had his good qualities, he was a jovial guy,” James continued. “At best, [I had] mixed feelings about him in terms of the quality of his management for her. It was fairly well known to us that he had to have been taking advantage of her and had control over her money and a lot of stuff that he shouldn’t have had control over and took advantage of it.” His sphere of influence extended to her recording sessions with Mercury. “I think Preacher was also very involved in the decisions that were made on her behalf with recording,” he explained. “I remember him . . . not really knowing what he was talking about. Having way too much influence without an understanding of the music but trying to make a buck.”31 Conductor and arranger Lalo Schifrin agreed. In June 1963, eight months after Vaughan and Wells met, Schifrin and Vaughan worked together on her final album for Roulette, Sweet N’ Sassy. Preacher Wells attended the sessions and acted as Vaughan’s go-between. “He was coming with messages the next day, like, ‘The arrangement you’ve done for “More Than You Know,” Lalo, is outrageous!’ That meant, out of this world,” Schifrin explained. “I don’t think he knew too much about music. So this had to come from Sarah.”32
“We were underpaid,” said James, laughing. For him, and the other musicians in the trio, this was the clearest indication that things were not aboveboard. “He was taking a lot of money off the top, trying to pay the musicians as little as possible,” explained Mickman. “Out of the money he paid me, which was $225 a week, I had to pay my motel bill.” The musicians also had to pay for food. Mickman joined the trio in 1965, when he was twenty-five years old, and stayed for three years. He negotiated small raises along the way but still struggled to make ends meet. After pianist James left, Mickman became the group’s musical director and assumed a new set of time-consuming responsibilities, for which he didn’t receive extra pay. “I made $350 at the end, and that was terrible money,” said Mickman. “There were acts in Las Vegas where the sidemen were getting more than that.”
Yet Mickman and the other musicians, especially the younger ones, stayed because they were happy to have a steady job and more importantly because the music making was unparalleled. “Sarah was a genius singer,” Mickman explained. “It was an absolute thrill for me musically.” In 1955, when Mickman was fifteen, he fell in love with jazz, and posters of jazz musicians, including glamour shots of Vaughan, plastered the walls of his childhood bedroom. Now he was working with one of his idols. Through her exploration, her insistence on stretching her boundaries, she opened up his musical horizons, showing him new ways to interpret the standards night after night. “Sarah would change a note in a song, not every night the same one, but it would be such a great note,” he said. “Every once in a while she’d change a note, and it would be such a great note I would make a note—I’m standing right behind her—of what the lyric was in the song when she sang that note, and as soon as the set would end, I would put down my bass and go over to [the] piano and try to find that note with that chord, because it was so good.”33
“She wasn’t trying to be anybody else,” James explained. “She was her own person in sound, in style, in approach. The closer that we could get her to feeling comfortable with that, where she felt relaxed and felt like she could stretch out and do everything she was capable of doing, then we’d just have these amazing moments where the combination of her sound and her music artistry and the sophistication and the subtlety was beyond anything I’ve experienced since.” He left the band in 1968. After four years as her pianist and musical director, his apprenticeship had ended, and he was ready to do more studio work and begin building his own career as a solo artist. “I just loved the fact that I had the chance to work with an artist of that stature,” he concluded. “It’s a highlight of my career. I talk about it all the time; I’m very proud of it.”34
Mickman’s departure from the band was more contentious. “I had problems at the end of the job. I didn’t get paid, and this Preacher guy took taxes out of my checks and never turned it in to the government,” Mickman said. “He was a pretty nasty guy, and they owed me $1,200 at the end and nobody could find him.” Mickman approached Vaughan over and over, trying to get paid. “He’ll pay you,” Vaughan told Mickman, but Wells had disappeared. “Eventually I had to get someone to give her a summons to come at the court and pay me.” The entire process took over a year and soured his memories of working with Vaughan. “I didn’t listen to her records for a couple of years, and then I started buying them again. Because I just love her singing,” Mickman said. “She just didn’t handle money, she didn’t want to know about contracts or anything. She just wanted to be, just to be music.”35
By December 1968, Vaughan’s relationship with Wells had cooled. In April 1969, she filed a suit in New York Federal Court for a summary judgment against Wells and their management firm, Vaughan Wells Corporation. She asked for $847,000 in damages. She claimed that as her manager he collected $942,040 in earnings on her behalf but only remitted $26,000 to her, pocketing the rest. His commission should have been 10 percent.36
It was another contentious end to a partnership mixing romance and business, her third since she married Treadwell in 1946, twenty-two years earlier. It was the third time Vaughan had been blind to the financial misconduct of her managers, and the third time in her career she found herself in dire straits financially. And it wouldn’t be the last time she installed a love interest as her manager with mixed results. Lifelong friend and vocalist Billy Eckstine referred to her husband-managers as “damagers,” calling attention to the financial, emotional, and physical harm they inflicted on her, not to mention their lack of professional experience or connections in the music industry, requirements for effectively advancing her career. Indeed, Vaughan’s insistence on mixing her business and personal interests was one of her biggest blind spots, her Achilles’ heel, and most agree that it harmed both her and her career.
Yet Vaughan could not imagine living her life any other way. Music was not just her occupation; it was her life, inextricably intertwined with everything she did. It defined who she was at her very core, and perhaps she struggled to separate her personal and professional identities. Her desire that the man in her life be involved with her music making and her habit of making him her manager too, were merely symptoms of this. Her harshest critics attributed this pattern to a deeper insecurity, asserting that she was a lonely woman in search of constant validation. She needed to be in love and to have a man by her side. Some of her musicians and friends speculated that this behavior stemmed from her uneasy relationship with her father. He was stern and disapproving, so Vaughan sought acceptance elsewhere. Yet others were more generous. “She was like all women, looking for someone to love and to be in her corner, with a closeness, an understanding, and a sharing,” said friend Aretha Landrum.37
“She wanted her men involved in her life,” vocalist Joe Williams explained.38
She knew business but needed someone to take the burden off. She was perfectly able to plan the presentation, the work itself, but she needed someone to deal with promotion and the public. Somebody who would do her the favor of taking the constantly ringing phone out of her ear. Sarah needed someone she could trust—a husband, a lover, a best friend. Someone who was understanding and could alleviate the daily chores. She wanted her man to be involved in her life, and music was her life. If you are close to someone, you are involved in all aspects of that person’s life. She needed someone around all the time which is why a manager, with a life of his own, married to someone else, did not work out.39
“It’s very hard for a woman on her own on the road. You’re making a lot of money, and you’re a woman with a certain kind of power. There are always guys [who want to use you]. That’s their identity,” said vocalist Annie Ross of the famed trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.40 “And Sassy was peculiarly trusting, when she first met someone. Her naiveté was part of her charm.”41 Ross circulated in the same circles and knew what life was like for a woman in the industry. She remembers men surrounding her and Vaughan at the bars and after-hours clubs they frequented after work. “There was no shortage of people wanting to take us out,” she said.42 They would flatter the vocalists and buy them drinks. “Men could just wrap her around their finger if they showed attention to her. I’m sure all that stuff, she couldn’t resist it,” explained bassist Bob Magnusson, who worked for Vaughan during the 1970s, adding, “Everybody wants to be loved. Of course she was loved by [the] multitudes of the world. You want that personal care and love.”43 And given Vaughan’s brutal touring schedule, she had few opportunities to meet men not associated with the entertainment industry, outside of the bars and clubs where she worked and socialized. It was the same world that members of her church back in Newark referred to as the “sportin’ life,” filled with gamblers, gangsters, and hustlers. Men known for being rough, bending the rules, and displaying their own brand of hypermasculinity. But Vaughan was attracted to these men. She was drawn to well-dressed, handsome men, macho men with bravado and style. Men likely to be more invested in the same gender roles that she flouted. She also needed men who could leave their lives to follow her on the road. “They were available. And for the most part they could be charming,” said Ross of Vaughan’s choices in men, explaining, “You don’t have a lot of time to look around [for men] when you’re on the road.”44
By elevating the men in her life to the position of manager, Vaughan formalized their role, giving them more standing and legitimacy, not to mention gainful employment. Combining the role of husband or boyfriend and manager, however, also allowed Vaughan to realize her ideal vision for marriage, an ideal where husband and wife seamlessly blended their professional and personal lives in the pursuit of a common goal: making music. They were equal partners in life, love, business, and music. It was a difficult ideal to achieve. And the emphasis on equality was ahead of its time, a decidedly modern, some might say twenty-first-century, approach to marriage and gender equality. Although comfortable being “one of the guys,” Vaughan was a woman, and she enjoyed being a woman. But she also expected the same privileges and considerations granted men. Music, in particular jazz, allowed this. On the basis of her profound talent, she navigated the sexism endemic to the jazz world, earned the respect of her male colleagues, and soon emerged as a leader and standard-bearer. But society as a whole still did not encourage this. Her roles as a musician and ambitious professional woman were still incompatible with society’s more general expectations of wives, mothers, and women, both black and white.
There was another dynamic at play in Vaughan’s choice of managers, beyond her desire to be a manager’s sole focus or her vision of an ideal partnership that seamlessly melded the professional and personal. Her circle of contemporaries knew that, in order to truly succeed, a black artist needed a white manager. Louis Armstrong partnered with Joe Glaser for almost thirty-five years, until Glaser’s death in 1969. Nat King Cole’s work with Carlos Gastel kept him on the top of the pop charts for almost three decades. Norman Granz revived the careers of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, transforming both into international superstars. Not only were there virtually no black managers working in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, but white managers held the keys to access and power in the music industry. In 1980, vocalist Lena Horne confessed that her 1947 marriage to Lennie Hayton, then the musical director at MGM, was motivated more by her desire to advance her career than love. “I callously realized that I would have to associate with a White person to get the thing I wanted professionally,” she explained in Ebony magazine.45
White managers and producers offered to represent Vaughan, but she viewed them all with a deep skepticism and ambivalence. In 1946, she rebuffed John Hammond’s offer to make her the next Bessie Smith. In 1951, after Vaughan and Nat King Cole worked the Biggest Tour of ’51 together, Carlos Gastel, who helped Cole become the most popular black vocalist in the country, offered Treadwell $100,000 for Vaughan’s contract (even though the couple never formalized their business partnership with one). Treadwell refused, believing that he could profit more financially if he continued to manage his wife himself. And in 1958, during the World’s Fair in Brussels, George Wein suggested a partnership with Vaughan, but she declined his offer too. Within weeks, Vaughan married C. B. Atkins.
“She didn’t want a business manager, she wanted someone to take care of her personally,” said Wein. Perhaps she believed that having her husband as her manager allowed her more control of her career. She thought that a personal, romantic relationship offered her more leverage. Some might say that conflating the roles of husband or boyfriend and manager suggests that Vaughan had no real interest in being managed at all. She did not like being told what to do, and she bristled at authority, likely more so when it involved a white man in power. “She was comfortable with somebody that was from the same street she was,” explained Wein. “And if she’d had a white manager, she would have—she maybe could not have acted the way she wanted to.”46 It was a veiled reference to Vaughan’s drinking and drug use, her partying, which many deemed excessive and a symptom of a greater lack of discipline. Vaughan understood the complex dynamics between white men and black women and was unwilling to sacrifice her autonomy to a white man. Maybe at this point in her career, she simply preferred having black managers and wanted to keep the Sarah Vaughan enterprise within the black community (although, she would have white managers in the 1970s and 1980s). Or perhaps, as Wein suggested, she simply felt more at ease with people with a similar background and lifestyle to hers. People who shared her working-class roots, familiarity with the nightclub scene, and down-to-earth sensibilities, without the pretensions of the upper crust or establishment. She surrounded herself with these people, even though they lacked experience in management or the music industry. And it’s possible that she simply did not realize what good management, by someone with a larger vision and far-reaching contacts within the industry, could do for her career.
Regardless of the motivations behind Vaughan’s choices in managers, by 1967 her career was foundering. That summer, the Baltimore Afro-American profiled the top-earning black female vocalists, and Vaughan was no longer in the top tier. Led by Ella Fitzgerald, the “in crowd” included Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carrol, and Nancy Wilson. They regularly commanded $20,000 to $35,000 a week at the country’s leading clubs and lounges. In contrast, the “with it” but not “in” vocalists—the second tier, where Vaughan resided—earned as little as $3,500 for a week in the same venues and rarely exceeded $10,000. Television appearances were more lucrative, netting the “big four” $2,000 to $15,000 for a single short performance. Vocalist and actress Barbara McNair, a relative newcomer, recently received $7,000 for a television stint. “There was a time when ‘Sassy’ Vaughan could command that much and more,” the Afro-American’s Sam Lacy wrote. “But Sarah, possibly boasting the best voice of the lot, has suffered a sagging appeal in recent years, no doubt due to managerial problems.”47 Two years later, while reporting Vaughan’s split with Wells and subsequent lawsuit, the Afro-American declared Vaughan “the No. 1 singer of a decade ago.”48 She had no recording contract, the music industry was shifting beneath her feet, and she did not have a manager to navigate these new, choppy waters. Her career was not only in decline but in jeopardy.