If Newark’s music scene stood in for Vaughan’s high school education, going on the road with Earl Hines and his band earned Vaughan an Ivy League degree. On the surface, Hines’s band was just another swing band making the rounds of dance halls and theaters and headlining the occasional society benefit concert. By most measures, it would have been an education in its own right for the novice girl singer. But something else, something extraordinary, was happening in the Hines band behind the scenes. Hines excelled at finding new talent, and by the time Vaughan joined his band in 1943, the roster included the likes of trumpeter John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, formerly of the Cab Calloway band, and tenor saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, a relative unknown from the Jay McShann territory band, plus Gail Brockman and Shorty McConnell on trumpet, Benny Green on trombone, and Rossiere “Shadow” Wilson on drums.
In hindsight, we know that these musicians were on the verge of changing jazz. During intense jam sessions between gigs and after hours, they embarked on a process of musical exploration—challenging the known boundaries of jazz and swing, to create the innovative idiom that would become known as bebop, the foundation of modern jazz. And Sarah Vaughan was right in the thick of it.
“It was just like going to school. So that’s how fortunate I was,” Vaughan said years later.1 “I was sitting up there shaking in my boots. But that’s when I first realized I had something going there. I learned an awful lot from those guys, too. I just learned music, music and more music.”2 The emerging beboppers were a studious, intellectual crowd, committed to mastering the fundamentals of swing and music theory and then transforming the expected into something entirely new and different. The lilting, very danceable rhythms of swing were replaced by wickedly fast tempos, complex syncopation, and drummers “dropping bombs,” unpredictable explosions of sound. Melodic lines spanned the full range of an instrument, or in Vaughan’s case the voice, and often incorporated disjunct leaps and bounds. Hummable tunes became runs of fast eighth and sixteenth notes filled with syncopation that were then organized into asymmetrical phrases. The established harmonic language of swing grew and expanded to include bold clashing tones and dissonance. And beboppers brought all of this together to craft improvisations that ventured further afield and were more daring and dramatic than those of their swing counterparts. They brought an unprecedented complexity and rigor to jazz. In short, bebop musicians were developing a new language for musical abstraction, and it sounded innovative, fresh, and self-consciously modern.3
“I used to stare at [Parker and Gillespie] in amazement,” Vaughan said. “But I used to feel it; you know, [Dizzy and I] used to sit on the stand and we’d get to swinging so much, Dizzy would come down and grab me and start jitterbugging all over the place. It was swinging.”4 Vaughan was fascinated with Gillespie’s and Parker’s complete mastery of their instruments; the speed, agility, and brilliance with which they played; and the unusual harmonies on which they built their solos. She loved the environment of collaboration, innovation, and creativity. The thrill of musical exploration and the enthusiasm of her brilliant peers, who just like her had curious minds and an intense work ethic verging on obsession. Vaughan felt a kinship with her new bandmates.
Most important, however, Sarah Vaughan had the chops to hold her own. The awe and genuine respect she had for her new peers was returned in kind. “She came equipped,” Eckstine proclaimed in 1991 as he discussed her earliest days with the Hines band.5 No doubt her training as a pianist was paying off. “While I was playing piano in the [high] school band, I learned to take music apart and analyze the notes and put it back together again,” she explained in 1961. “By doing this, I learned to sing differently from other singers.”6 In other words, she could sit down at the piano and play beautiful progressions while singing and improvising her own countermelodies. She understood harmony and thus had the theoretical and technical know-how, not to mention the vocal mastery, to keep up with Gillespie and Parker.
“[Sarah] was as good a musician as anybody in the band,” Gillespie wrote in his autobiography. “She could play the piano, knew all of the chords, and played terrific chords behind us.”7 And she had good ears, meaning that in the spontaneous, free-flowing world of improvised bebop she could hear, not just intellectually grasp, the harmonic changes. This ensured that Vaughan could follow, and often dictate, the musical direction of a piece, regardless of where it went in that particular moment. She had the talent to lead the band.
All bebop musicians needed these skills, and as the movement became more popular, beboppers relied on cutting contests—fierce, testosterone-fueled musical battles with overt displays of virtuosity—to weed out poseurs and bebop wannabes. During after-hours sessions at the now-legendary Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown House, both in New York, seasoned beboppers tested the mettle of newcomers by transforming popular songs of the day into harmonic obstacle courses. Most musicians were proficient in the familiar, “easy” keys, so beboppers opted for the “harder” keys with lots of flats and sharps. Suddenly, without warning, they would change keys or play each chorus in a new key. One favorite trick treated competitors to a tour of the tonics, with the first chorus in A-flat, the next in A, followed by B-flat, B, and so on. It was a musical tongue twister that required enormous mental clarity and technical prowess. Chorus after chorus, one musician tried to best the other.
Eventually this experimental, after-hours work made its way onto the bandstand. Charlie Parker became revered for his treatment of “Cherokee,” a three-minute pop song that he expanded into thirty minutes of lightning-fast riffs and changes that showcased his near machine-like virtuosity. And the slow, romantic ballad “How the High Moon” became an intricate, up-tempo anthem for the progressive beboppers.
But this level of technical proficiency was not the norm, especially for vocalists. Many could not even read music, let alone play an instrument. In fact, early in his career, Eckstine fell into this category too (ironic given his harsh opinion of Madeline Greene and other girl singers). After an embarrassing audition with Hollywood producers, however, he taught himself how to read music and play the trumpet and valve trombone, which ultimately put him in good stead with the beboppers he later considered his colleagues.
On the whole, the bar was set fairly low for vocalists and even lower for female musicians of any kind. Widespread stereotypes perpetuated the notion that women simply did not have the intellect or musical proficiency to match their male, instrumental counterparts. And many musicians, critics, and jazz fans believed that women had no real place in jazz. Rather, they were mere commercial fluff, attractions to draw in less knowledgeable patrons. During the 1940s (and even today), the reality was that most women were not viewed as real musicians. Except for a handful of women, including Sarah Vaughan.
Her colleagues in the Hines band clearly recognized her talent, and soon the critics did too. Upon first hearing Vaughan at the Apollo in April 1943, just months after she joined the band, British-born critic Leonard Feather, then writing for the magazine Metronome, another leading jazz publication, declared:
It will be a long time before I forget “Body and Soul.” Toward the end she twisted the melody into a startling descending sequence of ninths. Every musician in the audience at that moment probably thought to himself, my God, this girl isn’t just a singer. She’s a musician. She knows changes. And what a quality!8
The critics were not the only converts; audiences loved her too. Eckstine recalled, “Earl would bring [Sarah] down to sing, and boy, she wrecked everywhere she went.”9
During Vaughan’s first year with the Earl Hines band, she crisscrossed the country more than once. After her successful trial at the Apollo and follow-up stints in Baltimore and Chicago, the band headed off to Boston, then south to Jackson, Mississippi, in March 1943. In April, they journeyed back again to the Midwest for a tour of theaters, this time with blues legend Ethel Waters joining the revue. Then Vaughan and the band finished off the month with another week at the Apollo. Next, Hines and his band headlined an all-star, all-black unit, featuring jump blues star Louis Jordan, in a tour of southern army camps. Between May 7 and June 3, twenty-eight days, the group hit twenty-five bases. Hines’s band stayed in the South for the rest of the summer, except for a quick detour to New York for a week at the Apollo in July, and then returned to the Midwest at the end of August for gigs in Chicago and Detroit. Finally, they had a short break, followed by rehearsals in New York and a week at the Apollo, and they were back on the road by late September. The band finished off 1943 with appearances in Washington, D.C., and in 1944 it all began again. It was an exhausting year, but by no means unusual.
Vaughan was eighteen when she went on the road with the Hines band. Except for her clandestine journeys to New York, only ten miles from Newark, she had never been away from home. “Everything was new to me,” she told Max Jones in 1981. “I’d never had so much fun. Yes, I had lots of fun in there, and yet I was shocked—scared to death really, ’cos I didn’t really know all this sort of thing went on.” The smoking and casual drinking that she began as a teenager trying to fit into Newark’s music scene had not prepared her for the seedy, very adult underworld of addicts, pushers, and hustlers that Vaughan discovered on the road. “You know, I was just a young singer from Newark.”10
When Jones asked about her life on the road with the Hines band, Vaughan chuckled and then responded, “Yeah, one girl and sixteen guys; what the hell. What else can I say?”11 She had little or no privacy and rarely had time alone, away from the men in the band. If they were not rehearsing or performing, they were on their way to the next gig. Popular bands could easily travel fifty thousand miles a year, often making jumps of 200 to 450 miles a night. In the 1930s and early 1940s, buses were the norm. A home on wheels, they provided not only transportation but also a place to eat, sleep, socialize, and at times even practice. As World War II intensified, however, rationing of rubber and gas eventually led to a complete ban on nonessential driving in January 1943. Just as Vaughan went on the road, the big bands started traveling by train, and the life of touring musicians became even more complicated.12
Musicians were bound to train schedules and often spent hours, usually in the early morning, waiting for the next train. Then they found themselves on crowded, overbooked trains, standing in the aisles as they clutched their instruments and luggage. By the time they transported themselves and their gear from the station to the next club or dance hall, they barely had enough time to change clothes before going onstage.
For the boys in the Hines band, this was doable. They wore uniforms, usually modeled after a suit and tie. They had short hair and could “clean up,” when they had the chance, in a restroom. Vaughan, the sole woman in the band, had a harder time. She was expected to wear fancy gowns and exude an effortless glamour and beauty, an extreme femininity, complete with immaculate hair and makeup. But stockings ran. Gowns creased and crumpled in suitcases, and there was often no time or place to press them, not to mention clean and mend them. While in the Hines band, Vaughan reportedly got a cigarette burn in the back of her only dress, a long, flowing white gown. From then on, she never turned around while onstage, making sure that her backside faced the orchestra at all times.
Being a girl singer required a certain kind of woman, and according to Eckstine, Vaughan fit the bill perfectly: “A girl on the road, man, she’s got a tough job, man. . . . She’s got to be a certain type of chick. Because when the bus stops [the guys] run to get the rooms. They’re going to run all over her. They ain’t goin’ to pick up her bags. Bullshit to that. She’s got to be a strong person and a liked person. If it is one of those broads with her nose in the air, oh, she’s in trouble. Sass was perfect on the road with the guys.”13
“Sarah Vaughan acted just like one of the boys,” Gillespie recalled. “She put herself in that position, one of the boys, just another musician.”14 Unlike many girl singers who isolated themselves in the hotel when not working, Vaughan constantly hung out with the band. She ate, drank, and smoked with them; went to the movies with them; played ball with them, ran foot races, and roughhoused with them. If an argument broke out, she’d ball up her fists, ready to box, just like everybody else in the band. And when a separate hotel room was not available for her, she bunked with the guys too.15 On the long train rides, the band often played cards and dice to pass the time. Vaughan didn’t shy away from gambling; she was in on the band’s many jokes and pranks; and she even mastered the art of cussing and swearing, earning herself the nickname “Sailor.” “I remember Ella [Fitzgerald] never acted like one of the boys; she always played the role of a lady,” Gillespie wrote. “But you could say anything you wanted to in front of ‘Sailor,’ uh, I mean, Sarah. She’d use the same language I used with the guys.”16
Pianist John Malachi agreed: “Sarah was just so unique, because she wasn’t like a lot of girls would have been, that you had to treat her different or something like that.” A few days after he began working with Vaughan in the summer of 1944, he remembered sharing a cab with her to the train station in Washington, D.C., as they embarked on their tour of the South. They were both burdened down with luggage, so Malachi, in an act of chivalry, opened and held the door for Vaughan. “And Sarah, this girl that I hardly know, I’ve just smiled and spoken to on the bandstand a couple of times and at rehearsal, looks at me and says, ‘What are you standing up there looking at me for, fool? Go on through the door.’” He did, and as Vaughan followed, she exclaimed, “You damn fool.” “It was never an angry thing,” Malachi insisted, “but I was more hurt than ever, because I didn’t understand that kind of behavior, you know, coming from a girl.” He soon realized that Vaughan not only expected to be treated just like the men in the band, she insisted upon it. “You couldn’t do anything for her,” he recalled in 1983. “You talk about women’s lib. She was liberated long before any woman that I know.”17
Life on the road was difficult anywhere, but conditions became nearly unbearable as soon as black bands ventured down south. Although the Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery in 1865, southern blacks still lived within a strict caste system. Jim Crow and its laws of segregation dictated every aspect of their lives: where they could live, eat, work, and go to school, and where and with whom they could socialize; Jim Crow even dictated the rules of the road. Driving etiquette in the Mississippi Delta, for example, forbade black drivers from overtaking cars with white passengers on unpaved roads. A car with a black driver and black passengers might stir up dust that would get on the white passengers in the car it passed. And the laws and social customs of Jim Crow varied from city to city, county to county, leaving black travelers extremely vulnerable as they navigated a constantly shifting landscape of rules and expectations.18
Yet black musicians had no choice. Many of the most lucrative gigs, at the best theaters, clubs, and hotel ballrooms in the North, only booked white bands (regardless of their skill level), so even the most famous black bands had to tour the South in order to stay afloat.
Each and every tour of the South brought a series of indignities. Black musicians traveled on segregated trains, performed in segregated clubs, and were not allowed to stay in white-owned hotels or eat at white restaurants. If they were lucky, a white friend, perhaps a manager, might order takeout for them to eat outside, behind the restaurant. But usually black musicians had to search out the black district of town. When kind black families couldn’t take them in, they had no choice but to stay in the substandard yet overpriced lodgings that catered to African Americans. According to bassist Milt Hinton,
A hotel might charge you five or six dollars, and man, it was terrible. One bathroom ’way down the hall. They wouldn’t even change the sheets on the bed sometimes. Bed bugs, roach-infested places that they didn’t clean up. And they just figured, the hell with it. They didn’t have to clean them up, because we had no other place to go. And they were all black-owned. And we really resented this highly, because they knew that they had us. And our same brother white bands were staying in hotels, and the guys were paying two or three dollars a day, in nice white hotels.19
And the food was awful: “‘axle-grease fried chicken’ or dried-up ham sandwiches on even more dried-up bread.”20 During his early years on the road, Billy Eckstine developed the habit of inspecting his sandwiches before eating them to make sure that ground glass, vermin feces, or other contaminants hadn’t been added, and he did this for the rest of his life.21 Making matters worse, producer Teddy Reig described how when bands did get to eat in a restaurant, the owners would “take all the prices down and charge us three times as much. And then the pièce de résistance: the promoter would let people in for half a buck apiece to watch us eat!”22
The system was not fair, and the inequities that black bands encountered on the road were compounded by the expectations of many southern whites. Although they were eager to enjoy black talent, southern whites insisted that blacks remain subservient. Any transgression, real or perceived, could result in violence, and even death. When Vaughan began touring the South in the 1940s, lynchings still took place, and the smallest breach of Jim Crow laws could set off an angry mob of whites in search of vigilante justice. Black victims were regularly tortured—beaten beyond recognition, dismembered, and burned—often in a carnival-like atmosphere, complete with white onlookers, including families with young children, cheering on the violence. The threat was real. In 1980, Vaughan told pianist Butch Lacy how, while she was working with the Billy Eckstine band in the south, the Ku Klux Klan showed up at one of their gigs, wearing their robes, with guns in hand, and began shooting. Vaughan and the rest of the band ran to their bus, and as they sped out of town, the Klan lined both sides of Main Street, shooting holes in the bus. The band escaped unharmed by lying on the floor.23
All African Americans knew the South’s history of racial violence, yet many black musicians, especially northerners, experienced culture shock when they toured the South. They simply did not have an intuitive understanding of the South’s ingrained racism, and they unwittingly offended southern whites, perhaps by expressing an opinion, asserting too much autonomy and independence, or otherwise stepping out of line. Some musicians, however, deliberately provoked confrontations. They viewed themselves as skilled, highly trained professionals. Many of them had achieved international critical acclaim and were celebrities within the African American and general music communities. They bristled at the treatment from southern whites, rebelled, and stood up for their rights as artists and human beings.
While Vaughan was with the Hines band, Gillespie was attacked in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, during a white dance. The musicians couldn’t mingle with the crowd or sit at the bar during intermission, so Gillespie stayed on the bandstand to practice the piano. A white man requested a tune and threw a nickel on the stage. Gillespie refused, threw the nickel back, and kept on playing. Later that night, when the hall was empty, Gillespie used the “whites only” bathroom. As he came out, he was hit on the head with a bottle and grabbed by five men. He struggled and tried to fight back, but he was bleeding and outnumbered. Luckily, Charlie Parker intervened and yelled, “You took advantage of my friend, you cur!” “That was funny,” Gillespie wrote in his autobiography, “because I know that peckawood didn’t know what a cur was.” Still, Gillespie required nine stitches to his head.24
Vaughan remembered other moments of defiance, where the tables were turned. “One time we were on a train,” she said during her interview for Gillespie’s autobiography. “We were coming from down South. You know that train was split, colored and white, segregated. One white fella was sitting by the train door eating chicken, and he threw the chicken bones back in our part.”25 Conditions in the Jim Crow car were substandard and often unbearable. The car lacked air conditioning or heat, making it terribly hot during the summer and cold during the winter. It was overcrowded, especially during the war years when more people used the trains. It was less safe: positioned at the front of the train, just behind the engine, the Jim Crow car took the brunt of the impact in any collision, resulting in more damage and casualties. It was loud, and it was dirty. Soot from the engine flew back into the car, covering everyone with a layer of grime and dust. Conditions were so unpleasant in the first car of the train that white passengers refused to sit there. Black passengers ended their journeys filthy, the musicians among them struggling to look presentable for their next gig. So when that “white fella” began using the Jim Crow car as his personal garbage can, Vaughan and her bandmates were incensed. But they waited until the train arrived in Washington, D.C., the official ending point of Jim Crow. “We had some friends of [Eckstine]’s who came from Washington that used to just travel around with us, just for the hell of it,” she continued. “Very tough hustlers from Washington. They didn’t say nothing, didn’t bother him until we got in. We pulled into Washington, and that’s when it all started.”26 The band got off the train and waited for the white man on the platform. “God, it was bloody. They knocked that guy back up in the train. I even kicked him a little bit,” a smiling Vaughan elaborated during an unusually candid interview with Dick Cavett in 1980. “Then I ran ahead to see if the police were coming. And they were. There was a grove of them coming. I ran down to tell the guys ‘Let’s make it.’ So as we were going up [the stairs], the police were running down past us to find out what all of the disturbance was. So we got away with that one.”27
Without Jim Crow, the North was better, but the band still encountered plenty of discrimination. Years later, Vaughan told pianist Mike Wofford, who worked with her in 1979 and 1983, that Philadelphia was one of the worst cities for visiting black musicians. While Vaughan was touring with the Earl Hines band, Hines took the crew to a clothier to buy new uniforms. “They went to this warehouse at the back of the clothing store . . . and the guys’ suits in various sizes were on the rack there and they were only able to point to the suit that they felt would probably be the best for them. They couldn’t touch them or try them on,” Wofford recalled. “I remember Sarah telling me that with a disgusted look.”28
Another time, Vaughan described waiting for a train after performing at a dance in Wilmington, Delaware, where “they still had the whipping post downtown in the middle of the street,” she told Les Tomkins in 1977. Eckstine, affectionately known as “B.,” wanted to get his shoes shined, but the white teenager manning the booth refused. “On the station, all the cats were laying out there, sleeping, waiting for the train to come in. So B. walks up, and says: ‘Hey, fellows—there’s a guy back there who says he don’t shine no nigger’s shoes!’ So the guys said: ‘Oh, my goodness. Here we go again.’”29 In a show of unity, the entire band got up, slowly walked toward the young man, and got in line. Outnumbered and confronted by a group of fifteen black men demanding service at one in the morning in an otherwise empty train station, the shoe shiner acquiesced. The band quickly retreated. “We left town by foot. Everybody spread out and said, ‘I’ll see you at the next gig,’” Vaughan said, in a later account of the incident.30 “Yeah, we had fun doing things like that. It made life’s problems bearable. B. was always the little instigator; he liked to start things.”31
Vaughan, on the other hand, was not a little instigator. Perhaps the confrontational style of Eckstine, Gillespie, and the other boys in the band did not suit her shy, more introverted personality. There was no need to offend or provoke. And perhaps, as a woman, she understood that she was more vulnerable to the advances of strange men and the violence that they might bring with them. Instead, Vaughan, like many of her contemporaries, played the part expected of her. “When we went down South,” she said, “if we were supposed to say ‘Yessuh’ and all that, we would, to keep the peace, but we always had a plan in mind.”32
Early on Vaughan realized the power of her voice to unite and bring people together. She was able to get southern whites to see and hear her as an individual rather than a racial stereotype—an impressive feat at the time. “Before we left, all those guys were saying: ‘Boy, that girl sure can sing,’” she explained. “After we got with ’em, we’d speak in our natural voices, and they’d say: ‘Well, there’s some good niggers from up North.’”33
By the time the Hines band returned north at the end of August in 1943, Billy Eckstine had had enough. “Hell, no! I don’t want to go down South anymore, Earl,” he said.34 He had just gotten married and decided to stay put in New York City and work on 52nd Street, the hotbed of progressive jazz. Eckstine had aspirations of becoming a solo act, perhaps even starting his own band.
The innovations of the young, up-and-coming beboppers had whetted Eckstine’s appetite for the avant-garde, and he wanted to learn more. But Hines was changing directions in favor of a more commercial, novelty-driven band. In September Hines, always the showman, added an all-girl string section, a harp player, and the Bluebonnets, a female vocal quartet that had performed with the unit during their tour of military bases earlier that summer. According to Eckstine, when he put in his resignation, nine other guys followed, including many of the band’s most progressive musicians, such as Gillespie, Wilson, Parker, and Benny Harris. Vaughan, however, stayed behind.
Eckstine had spent almost five years with the Hines band and a few years before that working in Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago.35 But Vaughan was just eight months into her career as a professional musician. She needed more time to develop and establish herself. Plus, she was under contract with Hines for a year, until January 1944. The Hines band meant job security in a notoriously fickle industry where it was hard for girl singers to find regular work. While there were four trumpets, four or five saxophones, and four trombones in each swing band, there was only one permanent girl singer and many candidates vying for the position. After Hines dismissed Madeline Greene, the vocalist that Vaughan replaced, Greene spent months bouncing between short-term gigs, struggling to find steady employment. Vaughan was smart. She had a good job and kept it, staying on with Hines for another ten months as the band made its rounds of the Midwest and mid-Atlantic states, all while waiting for her next opportunity.
Nine months after leaving Hines, Eckstine had found representation and financial backing to start his own band. He installed Dizzy Gillespie as his musical director, convinced Charlie Parker to join, and then recruited many of his old friends from Hines’s band. After three weeks of rehearsals, Eckstine’s fledgling band was ready to make its debut in Wilmington, Delaware, on June 9, 1944. But they still needed a girl singer, and that’s when Eckstine called Vaughan. Only then, with the promise of consistent work and another opportunity to create alongside her fellow bebop innovators, did she leave Hines to join Eckstine in his new venture.
Billy Eckstine’s unit was a magnet for progressive musical talent. In addition to Gillespie, Parker, and Vaughan, drummers Art Blakey and Shadow Wilson; tenor saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Gene Ammons, Lucky Thompson, and Budd Johnson; pianist John Malachi; and trumpeters Fats Navarro and Howard McGhee were all on the band’s payroll during its first year. The band’s roster, Vaughan’s closest colleagues and collaborators, was a veritable who’s-who of the emerging bebop movement. The experimentation that began in the Hines band primarily behind the scenes and after hours took center stage. Eckstine’s band became the first bebop big band, a designation that has cemented its position in the history of jazz.
Early on, however, the Eckstine band struggled to establish itself, and they had to make money. To do that the band had to tour (ironically, considering Eckstine’s disdain) the South. After the gig in Delaware, they headed down to Washington, D.C., then further south into North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and finally Missouri.36
After weeks of grueling one-nighters, the band took up residence in St. Louis in late July. Originally, they were booked into the white-owned Plantation Club, but upon arriving at the club on the first night Eckstine insisted that they enter through the front door rather than the back as expected. The club management, a collection of gangsters, was furious and fired the band on the spot, before they had played a single note. Eckstine, thinking on his feet, swapped gigs with George Hudson’s band performing across town at the black-owned Riviera Club.
Living in St. Louis in 1944 was an eighteen-year-old Miles Davis. Just out of high school, Davis idolized Gillespie, and when he learned that Eckstine’s band was at the Riviera, he picked up his trumpet and hurried to the club. After he hung out at the club for several days, Gillespie asked him to sit in with the band to sub for a sick musician. Davis was simply blown away by Gillespie and Parker. “Sarah Vaughan was there also, and she’s a motherfucker too. Then and now,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Sarah sounding like Bird and Diz and them two playing everything! I mean they would look at Sarah like she was just another horn. You know what I mean? She’d be singing ‘You Are My First Love’ and Bird would be soloing. Man, I wish everybody could have heard that shit!”37 The experience changed Davis’s life. In that moment, he decided to move to New York and pursue a career in music.
Not all audiences were as enthusiastic about the Eckstine band and the new music that they played. “Everybody was staring at us a lot during that time,” Vaughan said in 1977. “We’d play dances, and people would be standing and staring.”38 Musicians were thrilled, but general listeners didn’t know what to make of the crazy rhythms and frenetic solos that the Eckstine band presented. A reviewer in Cleveland lamented that while Vaughan was great as she “chirped ‘I’ll Walk Alone’ in a voice that was soft and pleasing,” the band as a whole was “much too noisy,” and that the antics of Gillespie were over the top and distracting.39 Another reviewer, writing about the band’s gig at the Riviera in St. Louis, didn’t like Vaughan either. “We suggest that Eckstine should get a girl vocalist who looks better in her clothes and is more suitable for his type of ballads,” the review read, according to Eckstine. “They were writing about Sarah Vaughan, but never stopped to hear this girl’s voice. They were looking at her as a sex object, instead of listening to her sing. That’s what we were confronted with!”40 It was an uphill battle, and, in 1954, Eckstine conceded, “I was losing a lot of loot with the band because—well, it is history now—the people were not quite ready for that type of music.”41 Audiences were still crazy about dancing, and bebop was not danceable. “Only a few, that knew what we were doing, and could understand the rhythm and stuff, would be jitterbugging around forever in a little circle in the corner,” Vaughan said. “When we played slow tunes, everyone would dance, but once we got back into those fast things, they would stare again.” Yet Vaughan insisted that the music they played was not a deliberate act of experimentation or innovation. Rather, it was an effort to be artistically true to themselves, to play music that inspired them and educated their listeners. “They call that the bebop era, but I call it the good music era,” she said.42
Even in the face of repeated rejection and the risk of financial failure, they all continued to put themselves out there, make themselves vulnerable, in order to create new, innovative music that truly expressed their artistic ideals and aesthetic. They looked out for one another, and these experiences fostered an intimacy, trust, and bond not unlike that found in a family. Still, it was difficult being the only woman in the band, just as it might be difficult being the only girl in a family with eight brothers. “It was a very rough band,” said Vaughan.43 “Everybody in that band had a pistol,” Gillespie wrote. “If you went down South, you’d better have one and a lot of ammunition. We were musicians first, though, and fun-loving peaceable men. But don’t start no shit.”44 Vaughan did not carry a gun; instead, she used her hatpin to protect herself.45 The violence they encountered on the road, especially in the South, sometimes found its way into the group dynamics. The guys in the band were young, brash, and assertive, and without the calming leadership of Earl Hines, a jazz elder, it’s possible that Eckstine’s band was more rowdy and raucous. Eckstine in particular had a reputation for being extremely tough. He was known to knock guys out at the slightest provocation. And his treatment of women was notorious. Davis described Eckstine, who was married at the time, introducing his girlfriend of the moment as “my woman.” She objected and insisted that Eckstine tell Davis her name. “B. turned around and said, ‘Bitch, shut up!’ He slapped the shit out of her right there,” Davis wrote. The woman was furious as Eckstine laughed at her, then said, “Aw, shut up, bitch. Wait ’til I get some rest. I’m gonna knock your fucking ass out!”46
By all accounts Eckstine was more fraternal with Vaughan. In the band she was a musician before she was a woman. But she was still a woman—a very young, relatively inexperienced woman. When she first joined Hines’s band, Eckstine remembered, “Myself and guys in the band like Shadow Wilson, Bird and Diz, Benny Harris and Shorty McConnell, we raised Sarah and showed her practically everything that the music business was about.”47 Vaughan agreed. “Not only did I learn much stage presence from Billy, but several other members of the Hines band were like fathers to me,” she said.48
The guys in the band were her fathers and brothers, and much like a younger sibling, the little sister, she wanted to do everything that they did. Drugs were a part of life on the road. Marijuana, and increasingly heroin, had become essential components of a black hip or “hepster” lifestyle and identity. Drug use provided refuge from a racist world, while acting as a form of protest against a society that did not include them. And as musicians, it symbolized their membership in a unique, insider club, one that valued creativity, spontaneity, and freedom.49 Vaughan saw musicians using heroin and wanted to try it too, so she finally approached Charlie Parker. “Bird, come on. Help me out, man. You know I want to know what it is. I want to know. I got to know. I got to know. Get me high. Get me some of that stuff,” pianist Carl Schroeder remembered Vaughan saying as she told him the story during the 1970s. “No. I can’t. I ain’t got time—baby, get out of here. Leave me alone,” Parker replied. But Vaughan persisted, and Bird continued to refuse, telling her that she did not want to try this. He knew far too well the horrors of heroin addiction. Eventually, however, Parker relented. He took her money, left the room, returned with a syringe, and injected her with it. “So, how does that feel?” he asked. “Oh yes. This is—oh yes. I like this,” she said, “I feel good. Mmm mmm.” Only later did she learn that Parker had shot her full of water. “Think about the amount of love that Bird showed to Sarah in that. He said he would, but he couldn’t bring himself to,” Schroeder concluded. “I find that story to be so touching between these immense figures: Bird and Sarah Vaughan. The simple, dignified act of refusing.”50 In 1977, when asked about her days with Charlie Parker, she alluded to his heroin addiction, adding, “I never got that far.”51 But it was well known, especially as her career progressed, that she regularly used marijuana and cocaine.
While the guys were protective of their newest vocalist, nurturing her along as she adjusted to the world of show business, they could also be strict, almost punitive disciplinarians. “Later, when she was in my band,” Eckstine said, “if she came late for a job we didn’t bother to fine her. I would never fine Sarah if she was late. I’d turn her over my knee and whip her ass. She wouldn’t often be late after that. And when she did come in late she looked around cautiously. Because one of us was behind the door to grab her and beat the hell out of her. So Sarah just came up right as a bunch of the guys: just as a musician.”52
Eckstine is affectionate and good-humored. He seemed proud of his role in Vaughan’s early career and her ability to take it, just like one of the boys. Maybe she had to. “They kept me in order,” she said.53 “They would beat me if I didn’t listen to them!” Years later, she remembered one instance in particular:
One time, I was late going to Indianapolis, where the band was playing a dance; I was having so much fun in Chicago, I decided to stay: “I’ll see you guys later.” When I got there, the dance was just over; I walked in and said: “Hi, guys. Sorry I’m late.” So they all formed a circle round me and beat me to death! After getting hit on the arm by fifteen guys, when I left there both my arms were down by my sides. I couldn’t move. And I was never late any more. Yes, I could do no wrong in that band. If I did, I would do it no more. I was very fortunate, compared with other girls I’ve seen in orchestras.54
It’s hard to know exactly what other girl singers endured in order for Vaughan to consider herself lucky in comparison, but popular stereotypes of the time labeled women in the music industry as “loose women,” and, as a result, what is now considered sexual harassment was rampant. Industry men—club owners, bookers, and musicians—often expected companionship and sexual favors from female performers. There were reports of rape from girl singers traveling with otherwise all-male bands, although this aspect of life on the road has rarely been discussed or explored. Vaughan never mentioned this kind of abuse, and pianist Malachi, who often shared a room with Vaughan, insisted that their relationship was always platonic. “Sarah’s the kind of person that if she didn’t want to be bothered, you had a good fight on your hands,” he explained. “She could be just like one of the guys, and the guys did not bother her.”55
But Vaughan did have her romances. By September 1944, after three months of touring with the Eckstine band, she had become involved with trumpeter Marian “Boonie” Hazel. During a gig in Boston, one of the guys in the band came backstage between shows and said, “Boonie, man, there’s a pretty girl back there who just told me to come back here and see if you were in the dressing room. She wants you to come out there.” “Oh yeah?” replied Boonie, interested and flattered by the attention. “What’s her name?” His bandmate told him. “Okay, tell her I’ll be out in a minute,” said Boonie. Vaughan was not happy. She looked at him and said, “You go through that door and I’ll kick your ass.” “Shit,” he said, rolling his eyes. He ignored her, put on his coat, and started for the door. “Sarah put her foot in his behind, and they turned around and they went at it in the dressing room!” said Malachi. “And Sarah boxed just like any man, you know.”56
Sarah Vaughan didn’t take any flak. She had clear ideas of what she would and would not tolerate, but it took her time to establish these boundaries with the men she worked and socialized with. She needed to figure out her role in the social hierarchy of the band and what she, as the only woman, should and could expect, and, ultimately, what she wanted. Years later, stride pianist Judy Carmichael remembers Vaughan telling her, “Yes, [Billy Eckstine] was a real snake, but I have to give it to him because he was the one that told [me] I didn’t have to sleep with everybody in the band.” Vaughan was a woman of few words, but when she did say something, those around her took note. “And she just left it there, and I didn’t think she meant it to be heavy,” said Carmichael, a white woman who was only twenty-six when she befriended Vaughan in the early 1980s. “It broke my heart. Yes, it was deep.”
Reflecting on her own experiences as a young woman entering the world of jazz in the late 1970s and early 1980s and hanging out with the Basie band, Carmichael explained, “You’re with a bunch of guys who are used to getting whatever they want, because the women are throwing themselves at them.” Women were available for sex, and it was all very casual. “I was a young golden lock; I could have been taken advantage of,” Carmichael continued. “I was just wandering around with no women mentors, no real [mentors]. Sarah was in a way, but she certainly wasn’t saying, ‘Look out for this, look out for that.’”57 Like Vaughan forty years earlier, Carmichael had to find her own way. Fortunately, the musicians that she hung out with from the Basie band respected her as a musician. “The Basie band had a protective shield around me, because I was so much younger,” Carmichael explained. “I wouldn’t get into the whole thing, and the word went out that, ‘She’s not to be messed with. Don’t even hit on her.’”58
Eckstine protected Vaughan too. He reminded her that she was a musician. Sleeping with the guys in the band was not part of her job description. She had a choice. He also reminded her, although more subtly, that there was a different set of expectations for men and women. While it was socially acceptable for men to be promiscuous, Eckstine included, this was not the case for women. Double standards aside, in his own way Eckstine was safeguarding Vaughan’s virtue. Nonetheless, living and working in a climate that objectified women and allowed the sexual assault of women must have been unnerving for Vaughan. And it is ironic that within this world that offered her so much creative freedom, not to mention the opportunity to explore new places and people, there were still clear limitations on what she, the only woman in the band, could and could not do. Her tolerance of this reality, despite what she may or may not have experienced, was the price she had to pay for “equality.” To be considered one of the guys, both socially and musically, she had to accept whatever they doled out.
Was there a double standard? Did her male colleagues receive similar punishment for similar lapses in personal and professional judgment? Probably not. Take Charlie Parker. As Parker’s drug addiction escalated, his behavior became more and more erratic, and less professional. While in the Hines band, Eckstine remembered Parker pawning his horn and missing more shows than he made, but Hines simply fined him, and the other guys in the band would shame him, explaining that, musically, they needed him. The band just didn’t sound right with four instead of five reeds. Parker also had a collection of quirks: he wore sunglasses onstage; he often slept on the bandstand during performances; and he didn’t like to wear shoes when he played, preferring instead to rest his feet on top of his shoes. More than once he forgot to put his shoes back on before rushing out front for his solos. And others described him passing out cold during solos. Parker was regularly fined, and occasionally fired, but for the most part bandleaders tolerated his many eccentricities, and, unlike for Vaughan, there are no accounts suggesting that these infractions earned Parker a beating or any other kind of physical confrontation.
In order to survive in Eckstine’s band and the music world at large, Vaughan had to fend for herself. She needed to know when to fight and when to let things go. One battle she did choose to wage involved records. While with the Hines band, Vaughan and her bandmates were prohibited from making commercial recordings; concerned that phonograph records were replacing live entertainment and thus causing musicians to lose work, the American Federation of Musicians initiated an industry-wide recording ban on August 1, 1942. By the time she rejoined Eckstine in June 1944, the ban was finally winding down. At last, Vaughan and the other aspiring beboppers could make records. That same month Eckstine signed a yearlong contract with DeLuxe, and Down Beat reported that Vaughan and Eckstine would share vocals on the upcoming releases.59 But nothing happened. Fall became winter as the band toured the Midwest and New England, and even though they had made multiple stops in New York, where the band recorded, Vaughan still had not made her first record. She was tired of waiting and made a fuss. “They were recording, and I was just sitting there wondering how come I couldn’t make a record. But [the label] wouldn’t let me make none; so I just boo-hooed so. . . . I mean, you could hear me all over the place,” she said in 1977. “I cried about it. I cried so bad, till Billy Eckstine said, ‘Jesus—let her make a record ’cause this noise is about to kill me.’”60
On December 5, 1944, Vaughan finally made her recording debut with “I’ll Wait and Pray,” and while she had to fight for the opportunity, the band fought for her right to record too. The session included three ballads, all featuring Eckstine; an instrumental number composed by the band’s pianist, John Malachi; and a blues-based duet for tenor saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Gene Ammons. Vaughan was set to sing on the sixth and final side. Then the record executives at DeLuxe called Eckstine into their office as the guys in the band took a break. Eckstine returned, with a somber look on his face. “Fellows, come on. Gather around,” he said to the band. “Something’s come up. Instead of recording Sarah’s tune, the tune that she’s going to sing, ‘I’ll Wait and Pray,’ they would like for me to do another blues and have Sarah record this on the next record date.” DeLuxe wanted to capitalize on Eckstine’s popularity in the South. “So nobody smiled or did anything,” Malachi said. “All of a sudden, Sarah began to cry, since this is her first record date, and what these people are thinking about is makin’ some money, and they’re ignoring Sarah altogether. So Sarah began to cry. And to show you how close the band was, how tight and how much they cared about Sarah, everybody said, ‘Well, if Sarah don’t record, then nobody’s going to record. We’re not going to record anything else.’”61 Eckstine turned around, went back to the office, and told the executives. He returned with a smile on his face, and said, “We’re going to do Sarah’s tune.”62
In “I’ll Wait and Pray,” a moody, melancholy ballad by Malachi and trombonist Jerry Valentine, we hear that the foundation for Vaughan’s soon-to-be signature style is already firmly in place. As expected, her performance is polished and assured, if a bit stiff. Her voice is beautiful, and her tone full and rich, even though it features less vibrato than she used later in her career. The tempo is deliciously slow, making it clear that Vaughan already had a knack for infusing even the simplest ballads with subtlety and sophistication. She bent some notes and slid between others, hinting at the tune’s underlying harmonic structure. But the recording did not reflect how she sang in her live performances.
In 1977, while discussing her vocal style at the beginning of her career, Vaughan explained:
Oh, I was really going up and down the scale more so than I am now—I’ve tamed down a lot. Yeah, I think then they wouldn’t even know what the hell I was singing, because I was running all through the chords, and up and down and around. But I was in the band with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie—what else should you do? I was matching up to them—yes, indeed.63
Leonard Feather, who had been a big fan of Vaughan’s since her early days with the Hines band, was disappointed by the relative tameness and commercial nature of Vaughan’s first outing on wax. In his review of “I’ll Wait and Pray” for Metronome, appearing in the July 1945 issue, he lamented that the record failed to truly capture “the extraordinary richness of her tone and the originality of her conception.”64 This inventiveness and brilliance had prompted him to exclaim, “Ah mon vieux, this chick is groovy!” when he heard her perform live at the Apollo with Eckstine and the band in September 1944.65
Feather enjoyed his status as a well-connected white critic and prided himself on introducing black talent to white audiences. He was also an aspiring producer and composer who regularly arranged for black musicians to record his material during the sessions that he produced. He then used the pages of Metronome to praise his latest finds. It was a major conflict of interest. Black musicians, who had fewer opportunities than their white counterparts, understood this. They also understood that Feather had the power to make or break their careers. Eckstine, Gillespie, and Vaughan disliked Feather, who didn’t always have kind words for the band, and resented his influence in the industry. In the early days of Eckstine’s band, they sang the following to the tune of “Stormy Weather”:
I know why, we can’t get a gig on Friday night,
Leonard Feather,
Keeps makin’ it harder for me to keep this band together,
Talkin’ shit about us all the time.66
Of course, when they were with Feather, they made nice and played along, but they viewed him, and white men like him, as a necessary evil of the music business.
Gillespie shared a record demo of Vaughan with Feather in December 1944, and Feather was impressed. In his memoir, Feather remembers running into Gillespie outside the Nola Studio at 52nd and Broadway. “Come upstairs and listen to this,” said Gillespie. Feather writes that he immediately realized that Vaughan needed a recording session of her own, an opportunity to be a headliner. So he began shopping her demo around to all the major record labels in New York, but they turned him away without even listening to it. He was shocked. Finally, Feather persuaded Continental Records, at that time headed by Donald Gabor, to give her another shot.
Vaughan’s schedule with the Eckstine band kept her busy, but she was free to record on December 31, 1944. She and a pickup band squeezed into the only recording studio available that day: a small, clammy room high up in the RKO building, next door to Radio City Music Hall. Backed by a septet including Gillespie on trumpet, Georgie Auld on tenor, and Feather on piano, she recorded four sides. She earned $20 a side, while Feather, who produced the session, agreed to work for $12.50 a side. Feather also composed two of the numbers: “Signing Off,” a straightforward love song, and “No Smoke Blues,” a run-of-the-mill blues in the style of Ethel Waters about the impending cigarette shortage.67 Vaughan gave this blues a competent yet unmemorable treatment. Though there were some people that wanted Vaughan to be a blues singer, early on she knew this genre was not for her.
The highlights of this New Year’s Eve Day session were Vaughan’s renditions of two bebop staples: “East of the Sun,” arranged by Gillespie, and “Interlude,” a vocal interpretation of the instrumental standard “A Night in Tunisia,” composed by Gillespie. She was the first artist to record “Tunisia,” and she brought an easy swinging feel to both numbers. While she didn’t include elaborate turns, slides, or embellishments, she did demonstrate her mastery of bebop’s expanded harmonic language. In fact, due to its complex chord changes, Gillespie replaced Feather on piano for “Interlude.” Vaughan, however, easily navigated the harmonic terrain of both tunes, effortlessly leaping tritones, sevenths, and other tricky intervals. She also demonstrated her ability to grasp the larger musical arc of the pieces, expertly building a sense of tension and momentum that drove the songs forward and then finally resolved in a satisfying conclusion.
Immediately following this recording session, Vaughan went back to work. The Eckstine Band ushered in the New Year with another tour of one-nighters. They headed south through Virginia, the Carolinas, and into Florida, then west across Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, and they finally landed in Hollywood. On February 1, 1945, they began a month’s engagement at the black-owned Plantation Club in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles to enthusiastic reviews, then two weeks at the Silver Slipper in San Diego, followed by another string of one-nighters as the band zigzagged its way back east. They arrived in New York on April 1 for an Easter Sunday dance and then headed out on the road again for weeklong theater dates in Detroit and Chicago, a collection of one-nighters throughout Ohio and Kentucky, a week in Baltimore, then back into New York for another week at the Apollo, beginning on May 18. It was the band’s third appearance at the Apollo in the past year, an impressive feat for such a new band. It was also Vaughan’s last engagement with the band. After nearly a year on the road with Eckstine and the guys, she quit.
According to rumors, Vaughan walked out on the band during a recording session. She hadn’t made a record with Eckstine’s unit since “I’ll Wait and Pray” six months earlier, and she was still waiting for it to be released. Plus, Eckstine had just signed a new, more lucrative contract with National Records.68 The contract ensured that Eckstine had a showcase for his vocals, and this in turn laid the foundation for his career as a solo act, which he launched in 1947. The label’s president, Al Green, disliked working with women musicians. He thought they were too much trouble, and when Eckstine brought Vaughan with him to the studio, Green said, “No broads. No broads.”69 With no recording opportunities on the horizon, Vaughan had come to a dead end.
Records were crucial for an artist’s success, especially for black musicians, who had limited access to national radio broadcasts. They relied on records to draw audiences to their live performances, the primary source of their livelihood. By definition, Vaughan played second fiddle in Eckstine’s band. He was the headliner, and if she wanted to record more, she had to strike out on her own. Fortunately, before leaving the band, she had already found more recording opportunities. Gillespie invited her to a session with his quintet, which included Parker and drummer Sid Catlett, and on May 11 they recorded a memorable rendition of “Lover Man” for Guild. Then on May 25, while finishing up her week at the Apollo, she had another session organized by Feather, once again for Continental. This time drummer Max Roach joined Gillespie’s septet, with Parker still on alto, and together they backed Vaughan on three love songs, most notably her now-classic “Mean to Me.” It’s hip, swinging, and clearly shows the synergy that Vaughan had with her bandmates, particularly Gillespie and Parker. With the help of her friends, she was steadily building a collection of recordings.
Being a vocalist with a band had its limitations, especially for an ambitious up-and-comer like Vaughan. “I had about two or three arrangements, and I sang those songs to death,” she said. “I don’t know why, but vocalists in bands never had too many arrangements; those we had, we sang forever. Every night the same songs; if we wanted to do something different, the rhythm section would just strike up, I’d sing, and somebody would blow behind me.”70 But these moments of spontaneity were probably infrequent, perhaps more so since both Parker and Gillespie, her favorite creative partners, had already left the Eckstine band months earlier. Furthermore, after the gig at the Apollo, Eckstine’s band was gearing up for another tour of the South.
Vaughan had outgrown her role as a girl singer. It was time for her to move on.