In June 1945 Vaughan took the plunge and launched her career as a solo artist. It was truly a leap of faith—faith in herself and her talent. As a freelancer, she no longer had the backing of a big-name band or the promise of steady work. It was a risky move. Many successful vocalists with celebrity swing bands, like Harry James’s Helen Forrest, were able to support themselves in the band, but never quite made it out on their own. If Vaughan succeeded, however, just as she had two and a half years earlier when she competed at the Apollo’s amateur night, the possible rewards were tremendous: fame, fortune, and, most important, freedom.
The nine months following Vaughan’s departure from the Eckstine band were difficult. Although DeLuxe finally released her first recording, “I’ll Wait and Pray,” in June, Continental still had not issued the sides from her New Year’s Eve session (in fact, they never released “No Smoke Blues” and waited until June 1946 to release “Signing Off”). And records from her most recent sessions with Gillespie would not appear until the fall. Without the benefit of the publicity and exposure that these records would generate, she struggled to find work, landing only a smattering of gigs during this period. Fellow musicians remember seeing Vaughan perform on 52nd Street at the Three Deuces, Famous Door, Onyx, and Downbeat, often as an intermission pianist. Sometimes she sang while accompanying herself on the piano. Metronome critic Leonard Feather reported that she opened and closed, both in the same night, at the Spotlight, also on 52nd Street.1 And John Williams, a baritone saxophonist and former colleague from the Hines band, saw Vaughan outside the Braddock Hotel in Harlem. Located around the corner from the Apollo, the Braddock was the place for African American musicians to stay and hang out while working in New York. When she could afford it, Vaughan lived there (otherwise she went home to Newark). According to Williams, he ran into Vaughan during one of her rough patches: “I asked her to come to my room and sing a song for me, and I paid her five dollars to do it.”2 “Man, I always had to scuffle for bread!” Vaughan said in 1955, while discussing her early days as a solo act.3
After leaving the Eckstine band, Vaughan also spent a lot of time visiting with pianist Count Basie and his band while they played an extended engagement at the Roxy Theatre during the summer of 1945. “Sassy, as we also called her, and I had become very good pals by that time,” Basie wrote in his autobiography. “She was crazy about the band, and she was very friendly with the fellows, so whenever we were in the same town for a while, she used to drop by all the time, maybe every day, and just hang out backstage with them and also in my dressing room.” By this point, vocalist Thelma Carpenter had left the band, and Basie was auditioning new girl singers in his dressing room between sets. Vaughan often sat in and offered her feedback. Then one day, after listening to two or three singers, Basie was too tired to accompany another applicant. He wanted to relax before the band’s next set. Vaughan stepped in. “I’ll play for you,” she said. “Why don’t you just lie over there and listen and let me play.” “Well, if you don’t really mind,” he replied.4
Vaughan played, Basie listened, and then they discussed, agreeing that they should listen to a few more vocalists. “So this went on for a couple of weeks. She would come by there every day and play for me, so all I had to do between shows was lie on the couch and listen,” Basie recalled. “Now all I was thinking about during this time was what a great pal she was to be doing that for me. It wasn’t until later on that I realized that all the while I was supposed to be looking for a vocalist I had had one of the greatest singers in the world coming by there every goddam day, playing that piano so I could audition other singers.”
The old-school swing that Basie’s band specialized in would have been a departure from the progressive bebop that Vaughan favored, but the Basie band was famous and extremely busy, and his girl singers got plenty of opportunities to record. It was a good gig. Even though Vaughan was unemployed and clearly interested in the job, she never explicitly asked for an audition. Years later, when Basie asked her “why the hell she didn’t say something,” Vaughan laughed. “I thought you just didn’t want me,” she said. “I just thought I wasn’t what you were looking for.”5
There are few printed accounts documenting Vaughan’s performances in 1945. She appeared in an All-Star Jazz Concert on June 5 with Dizzy Gillespie at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. Five months later, she worked with violinist Stuff Smith’s trio at the Onyx, and together they recorded “Time and Again” on October 1. Then on November 23, six months after leaving Eckstine, she returned for a week at the Apollo. Frank Humphries’s band headlined, with Vaughan appearing at the bottom of the bill, much lower than she ever had as a girl singer with either Eckstine or Hines.
Things began to turn around in December. Bassist John Kirby hired Vaughan to sing with his sextet at the famed Copacabana. It was a real coup for a young singer. The mob-backed nightery was an elite supper club frequented by athletes, celebrities, and New York’s high society, and it featured the biggest names in the business. Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Tommy Dorsey were all regular headliners, and now Vaughan’s name was on the marquee too, although she performed in the smaller lounge upstairs instead of the main dining room. The job, however, was far from perfect. “At that time they didn’t allow colored people to come into the club,” said Vaughan.6 Just a year earlier Harry Belafonte, then seventeen and a newly enlisted munitions loader in the navy, was banned entry when he brought a date to the club. Belafonte remembered the white bouncer asking him to stand aside as he ushered in one white couple after another. When he asked what was going on, the bouncer replied, “No more seats, buddy.” Puzzled, Belafonte then asked, “How come all these other people are getting in?” “They got reservations.” Belafonte was humiliated and retreated with his girlfriend in tow as the crowd of affluent whites looked on.7
Conditions were not much better for the black performers allowed inside of the club. “We didn’t have any dressing rooms: I had to dress at home, do my show, then get out of there between shows, go round the corner, and have a few drinks,” Vaughan explained.8 Other times Vaughan and her fellow musicians pooled their money to hire a cab during the twenty-minute breaks.9 She didn’t stick around for the gig’s entire run. After a month, Vaughan quit. “From the outside, it simply seemed that Sarah was temperamental,” Metronome’s Leonard Feather wrote six months later, while explaining why she left. “The real reasons were probably far deeper rooted. There were more obvious, practical reasons, too. Such as the lack of proper dressing room facilities and the attitude about mixing with customers at the Copa.”10 She took a stand, one that in all likelihood hurt her career. Once again, she was without regular work, and for her principals she had gained a reputation for being testy and unreliable, potential death knells for any aspiring musician.
Although the Copa eliminated its “no blacks” policy in the 1950s, Vaughan’s resentment lingered. “You know, you wonder why those things went on like they did. I don’t know what music has to do with color, but it does,” she said in 1977 when asked about her time at the Copa. “Yeah, it’s a dumb world we live in, I think.” And when the club finally closed in 1973, Vaughan said that she was glad, adding, “I’m sorry it lasted that long!”11
It’s easy to dismiss this period of underemployment, a hiatus of sorts, as a minor disruption in an otherwise busy and extremely successful career. But at the time, the months following Vaughan’s departure from Eckstine’s band must have been worrisome and terribly discouraging.12 At just twenty-two, she must have feared she was yet another casualty of the music industry; like those of so many other vocalists with swing bands during the war, her career was potentially over before it truly had a chance to flourish.
Even though work had been slow during her first nine months as a solo act, Vaughan continued to make new contacts. While at the Copa she met Howard Richmond, recently returned from the war and eager to set up his own talent agency. He took Vaughan on and, along with the influential white producer and talent scout John Hammond, who had taken a fancy to Vaughan when she sang with Hines and Eckstine, helped her get an audition with Barney Josephson.13 Josephson was the owner of Café Society Downtown, the most racially progressive club in New York, if not the country.
Unlike the Copacabana, Café Society was fully integrated. Blacks and whites performed together onstage and mingled together in the audience, crowding around the small round tables that packed the L-shaped basement at 1 Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. Colorful murals à la Matisse and Picasso covered the walls, creating an atmosphere that was contemporary and sophisticated, yet edgy, with a countercultural vibe. Josephson, who was white and began his career as a shoe salesman from New Jersey, opened the club in December 1938 in response to New York’s exclusive “high society” and clubs like the Copacabana that catered to it. Billed as “the wrong place for the Right people,” Café Society was a haven for New York’s intelligentsia, celebrities, members of the press, and other musicians. It specialized in cabaret-style performances of jazz, blues, and folk music, and Josephson prided himself on discovering and developing new talent. In 1939, he introduced Billie Holiday to “Strange Fruit,” her protest song describing the horrors of lynching, and encouraged her to perform the now-iconic song at Café Society. And after hearing Sarah Vaughan at her audition in early 1946, he expected to have the same influence on her career.
“She was kind of awkward, rather dowdily dressed, and had a gap between her front teeth,” Josephson wrote in his memoir. “But her voice! I had never heard such a voice.” Vaughan’s audition also made an impression on Café Society darling Susie Reed, a zither-playing white folk singer, then eighteen years old: “I remember the night Sarah Vaughan tried out. I never heard anything like it, and I stayed and listened to her sing. I thought it was the most wonderful thing I had ever heard because she sang like an instrument, a clarinet.” Josephson agreed, though he likened her voice to a saxophone and explained, “I hired her then and there.”14
Vaughan opened Café Society on a Tuesday night, March 5, 1946. Billed as a “Sensational New Song Stylist,” she was one of six acts on the program, which included vocalist Josh White, boogie-woogie pianist Pete Johnson, and the house band, led by J. C. Heard. Each act performed a short set, three or four numbers, for a total running time of seventy-five minutes—perfect for encouraging a high patron turnaround at the club. She did three shows a night, at 8:30 P.M., midnight, and 2:00 A.M., with new material in each set.15 It was a good job with steady pay, and landing a gig at Café Society was a major accomplishment for any young performer. Josephson treated his musicians well, providing them with regular, long-term work and fair wages. Instead of the two- or three-week runs common at many clubs, Josephson hired his musicians for months at a time, sometimes for years. Pianist and vocalist Hazel Scott performed at the café for seven and a half years, pianist Mary Lou Williams more than five, and while Vaughan’s tenure at the club was much shorter, she stayed for six months.
“Sarah was not a hit,” Josephson wrote in his memoir. “She sings week after week, month after month. People would complain, ‘She can’t sing. She’s not even pretty.’ They protest my having her. . . . In general, I would say that Café Society attracted a rather intellectual crowd, knowledgeable about jazz. But they just didn’t understand what Sarah was doing.”16 According to Reed, “She did much more then than she did later, improvising around the melody. When she started singing commercially, she was much more on the melody of each song.”17 In 1946, Vaughan’s singing was progressive, heavily influenced by her years working with the bebop instrumentalists. The sophisticated passing tones and complex chord changes, plus her tendency to run up and down the scale rather than sing a song straight—the same qualities that made her a favorite of musicians and critics—simply didn’t fly with Café Society’s patrons.
They ignored her. Night after night, the audience talked over Vaughan as she sang, drowning her out, making it almost impossible for her to be heard. On one occasion Josephson remembered Paul Robeson, the acclaimed actor and civil rights activist, shushing the crowd: “In his melodious baritone, which cut through the chatter in the room, and without getting up, he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to hear this lady. Mr. Josephson considers her to be a great talent. Give her the courtesy of your attention if you please.’”18
Café Society was an intimate club. It had no stage. Instead, crowded tables surrounded the performer, just a few feet away. Vaughan could see and feel everything happening in the club, and it must have been difficult having to fight to be acknowledged. But her time at Café Society also made her a tougher, more resilient entertainer. It became a test of her determination and artistic integrity.
Years later she recalled John Hammond, the same influential producer who helped her land the job at Café Society, snubbing her during her performances. “Every night he used to come in, sit on the ringside, and read a newspaper,” she said.19 Whether or not Vaughan realized it, Hammond had a reputation for sitting up front, as close as he could possibly get to the music making, and if he liked the musician, he listened intently, engrossed. But if he didn’t like what he heard, he ignored the performer and read his collection of newspapers, biding his time until the next act came on. It was a public dismissal, one that could be seen by every patron in the club. And Hammond did not like bebop. “I became afraid about what the future might hold for me,” she confided to friend Robert Richards when she told him of Hammond’s nightly snubs decades later.20 Yet instead of cowering or compromising her artistic vision, as many young artists might have when dismissed by an industry powerhouse, Vaughan held her ground. Backed by the boys in the band, she became defiant and laughed at Hammond. “We loved it,” she said, “because it would sorta stop the show a bit; wouldn’t be too much getting done, due to us being in hysterics.”21
She believed that Hammond was holding a grudge. “Now, would you believe this!” she told Les Tomkins in 1977. “John Hammond, at that time, wanted to make me a Bessie Smith. I knew the name, but when I was little I really hadn’t heard too much about Bessie Smith. So I told him to stick it up his ear. He got a little peeved about that.”22
It was a risky move, like poking a sleeping bear. The son of a Vanderbilt and a wealthy corporate lawyer, John Hammond came from a position of power and privilege. As an executive at Columbia during the 1930s, he’d guided the career of Benny Goodman, encouraging him to embrace “hot jazz,” a move that eventually earned him the title “King of Swing.” He also specialized in bringing black talent to the attention of larger, white, mainstream audiences. He’s credited with launching the career of Billie Holiday in 1933; reviving the flagging career of the “Empress of the Blues” Bessie Smith herself, also in 1933; rescuing the underappreciated (and underrecorded) boogie-woogie pianist Meade Lux Lewis from an obscurity washing cars in a Chicago garage in 1935; and, in 1936, “discovering” Count Basie in Kansas City and guiding his band to national, and international, recognition. But Hammond’s help came with strings attached. He had a reputation for needing to be needed and considered himself a savior of downtrodden African Americans. Despite his liberal, integrationist politics, the black artists he advocated for were not his equals. He expected them to be beholden to him and do what he said. And when they didn’t, he could become punitive. In 1938 he reportedly fired Billie Holiday from Count Basie’s band when she, like Vaughan, refused to sing the blues. Holiday didn’t want to steal the spotlight from blues specialist Herb Jeffreys and opted instead to stick to “rhythm” numbers.23 According to trumpeter Rex Stewart, a longtime colleague of Bessie Smith, “If you dare criticize him, John Hammond will go out of his way to prevent you from working.”24
Vaughan’s nightly slight at Café Society was tame in comparison, but it still ruffled her feathers. “Imagine somebody doing that, just because you don’t want to do what they want you to do,” she lamented.25 Vaughan didn’t like being told how and what to sing. She understood that the blues were not for her, but she also did not want to be musically contained or typecast because of her race. “I was a little insulted about that, too, I think,” she said. “Back at that time, they thought all colored folk should sing the blues, for some reason or other.”26
And she was right. When Vaughan appeared on the music scene in 1942, there were very clear rules about which styles black and white musicians could perform. Black musicians were expected to limit themselves to the blues and blues-derived styles, like jazz, while white musicians could perform pop tunes, ballads, and folk songs, as well as jazz, blues, or any other style they wanted. White artists had the freedom of flexibility and the privilege of choice. Their musical choices were stylistic ones, rather than determined by their racial identity. This was not the case for black artists. Many white audiences assumed that black artists should perform the blues, and these expectations were, in large part, created by white record producers and critics. Hammond had a strong emotional investment in the blues and how they reinforced his image of black America. With their earthy sounds, working-class southern origins, and tales of hardship, the blues for him represented black musical expression in its purest, most authentic form. The blues were sincere and innocent—a true expression of natural, instinctive black talent. They epitomized the black vernacular and, for Hammond and many of his white contemporaries, became the only legitimate form of black musical expression.27
Vaughan and her fellow beboppers resented this. They did not want to be chained to the blues, which, to them, symbolized both social and musical restrictions. Musically, the twelve-bar blues were melodically repetitive and harmonically limited, usually centered on straightforward I–IV–V chord progressions. With relative ease, beboppers exploded these musical boundaries, crafting elaborate improvisations using their adventurous, often dissonant, harmonic language. Yet they struggled to overcome the larger social and cultural implications of the blues. For beboppers, the blues represented a rural, almost premodern, cultural past, not to mention the primitivist expectations of many whites, including the likes of John Hammond, who sought to pigeonhole black performers. Beboppers wanted to challenge contemporary views of black artistic expression as innate, the product of “natural” talent and instincts. They considered themselves highly trained, innovative artists with a cosmopolitan outlook. In response, Vaughan and her fellow beboppers developed a new form of black cultural expression based on their intellect and mental acuity, an insistence that racial boundaries were fluid, coupled with a contempt for musical labels and categorization. They sought the same freedom and privilege of choice as their white contemporaries, a kind of artistic equality, and in so doing challenged the status quo.28
Unlike her male instrumental colleagues, however, Vaughan’s relationship with the blues was complicated by gender and what the blues, as sung by black women, represented. Blues women like Bessie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, and Ethel Waters, the so-called red hot mamas, sang openly, and often explicitly, about their sexuality, desires, and troubles with men (and women). They condemned domestic violence and other forms of abuse and injustice. Blues women of the 1920s challenged the norms of patriarchy and reclaimed their agency, all while defining their own identities as black women. They were powerful voices of change. But they were also controversial. In the eyes of many religious black Americans, the music of blues women was coarse and vulgar. It was not proper. The black Baptist church worried that the red hot mamas confirmed widely held stereotypes that cast black women as lascivious and wanton. The church, practicing a politics of respectability, promoted, instead, an alternate ideal of black women as ladylike and refined, as pillars of the community and their race. The politics of respectability emphasized temperance, sexual purity, manners, and morals in an effort to counter prevailing white notions of black womanhood.29 These were the values instilled in Vaughan by her parents. She was a church girl and the daughter of devout Baptist parents, and her family forsook much popular music as unwholesome. Her family didn’t listen to the red hot mamas, and their music didn’t inform Vaughan’s childhood musical vernacular or emerging artistic agenda.
Vaughan confirmed her ambivalence toward blues women in 1949 when she participated in Leonard Feather’s now-iconic “blindfold tests” published in Metronome. These were drop-the-needle-style tests based on an ideal of colorblind, race-free listening where musicians ranked what they heard. Feather played Bessie Smith’s “Young Woman Blues” from 1926, and Vaughan was at a loss. “Julia Lee? Mamie Smith? Around 1930? I have absolutely no feeling for this,” she said. Then she recalled a recent gig in Kansas City with a blues singer, who she first mistakenly identified as the late Bessie Smith, who passed away in 1937 following a well-publicized car crash, then corrected herself: “No, I guess it was Julia Lee.” Blues women were simply not on her musical radar. “I’ve always wanted to find out what people see in this kind of thing, I’ve met so many people who treasure these records,” she explained. “But I don’t get it. No stars.”
At the conclusion of the survey, Feather asked Vaughan about her own vocal influences. “I’ve never been influenced by any particular favorite singers,” she said, a mantra she would repeat again and again throughout her career. She did, however, list a handful a vocalists she remembered listening to as a child. The list included expected candidates, notable black talent of the day like Billie Holiday and Billy Eckstine. It also contained the less expected—an eclectic mix of popular white singers: Frances Langford, a staple of 1930s radio and longtime USO collaborator with Bob Hope; Martha Raye, a swing vocalist known for adding blues inflections to her songs and convincing portrayals of black women in films; Tony Martin, a crooner turned actor; and Jean Sablon, a French balladeer, who, Vaughan confessed, “soothes me more than Sinatra!” “But my favorite singer,” Vaughan insisted, “is Marian Anderson—singer, I said! One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever been paid was when someone said I sounded like her at times.”30
In 1946, however, when pressured by record executives and industry insiders, Vaughan insisted on choosing her own path. She went against type and sang romantic love songs and ballads, up-tempo rhythm numbers, spirituals, and anything else she found musically interesting or inspiring. Of course, Vaughan was not the only black vocalist singing ballads and rhythm songs, but she always did insist on singing the material her way. She sought artistic freedom and equality. But the struggle for self-determination is a difficult, uphill battle. In August 1946, six months into her engagement at Café Society, Vaughan told Down Beat’s Michael Levin, “It’s been a long haul, Mike. I’m not singing other people’s ideas—I’m trying to make a style for myself. At least I’ll be different.”31
Despite these challenges, things finally began to come together for Vaughan during her Café Society run. On May 8, 1946, with the help of her agent, Howard Richmond, she signed her first official solo recording contract with Musicraft, an ambitious yet comparatively small independent label. Founded in 1937, Musicraft first specialized in classical music, then shifted its focus to popular music, especially jazz, during World War II. Mel Tormé, Teddy Wilson, Georgie Auld, Artie Shaw, and beboppers like Dizzy Gillespie all recorded on Musicraft. And Duke Ellington signed with the label on the same day as Vaughan, May 8, after being lured away from Victor with promises of a hefty $100,000 guarantee. Vaughan’s advance was more modest: a mere $100 per side, with a promise of recording sixteen sides a year. But her contract pledged to press at least eight hundred thousand records a year, with the goal of selling a million records.32 In the end, these aspirations proved unrealistic. Musicraft simply did not have the capacity to manufacture and distribute this volume of records. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1946 as Vaughan struggled to establish herself, signing with Musicraft helped lay the foundation for her burgeoning career as a solo act. During her first four months with the label, she recorded and released ten sides—five singles. Unlike her earlier collaborations with Gillespie, Parker, and fellow beboppers, these new releases only hinted at her bebop roots. She sang straighter, with an eye toward a more mainstream, commercial audience. With a steady stream of new records on the market, she began to get her name out there.
During her tenure at Café Society, she also appeared regularly on WMCA’s twice-weekly radio broadcast from the club, helping her reach listeners throughout the region. She supplemented her work at the café with special guest appearances at dances and charity benefits presented by organizations like the NAACP and New York Amsterdam News. And just as she became more visible within the New York scene, the national jazz press, also centered in New York, upped their coverage of her too.
In July 1946, Metronome published its first full profile of Vaughan, nearly four years after she won the amateur-night competition at the Apollo. Complete with a photo, recap of her career, and full discography, the piece introduced Vaughan to the magazine’s national readership. It seems as if Leonard Feather, the same critic who helped Vaughan land two of her earliest recording sessions, was determined to convince listeners, especially those who did not understand her singing, what made Vaughan so exceptional:
Well it isn’t any one thing, but a combination of qualities; the ethereally pure tone, her instrument-like sense of phrasing (Sara [sic] explains it by saying she’s always been crazy about musical instruments and tries consciously to sing like one), and, best of all, the occasional effects she achieves, generally toward the end of a song, by spreading one syllable over several notes and suggesting passing chords with these subtle variations on the melody.
He described her as a “musician’s singer,” adding, “There are musicians who are saying that nothing fresher, more inspired and original has been heard since Billie Holiday first came out of obscurity.”33
Down Beat’s Michael Levin agreed, and his profile published in late August proclaimed: “The Beat has raved about Vaughan for some time. In the last six months, her singing has noticeably improved, the tone being clearer and rounder, and attack being even sharper. . . . Add this to her flowing ideas and clarity of conception and La Vaughan for my money is right there with [Mildred] Bailey, Fitzgerald, and Holiday as the best in the country.”34
Unfortunately, the praise and acceptance that Vaughan received in the relatively tolerant world of jazz did not translate into a larger acceptance by society as a whole. Two weeks before Levin’s profile appeared in Down Beat, Vaughan and her friends George Treadwell, Naomi Wright, Johnnie Garry, and bandleader J. C. Heard were attacked after leaving Café Society early in the morning on Sunday, August 3. George was a trumpeter with the house band, Naomi was the club’s powder room attendant, and Johnnie worked behind the scenes as a stagehand. A gang of fifteen white men jumped the group as they entered the subway station nearest the café. The men shouted “Get niggers out of the Village” as they struck, kicked, and spat upon Vaughan and Wright, who, believing that the hoodlums would spare the women in the group, both tried to shield Treadwell from the most severe blows. The group got past the turnstiles, but members of the gang followed, chasing them down the subway stairs and into the corridor that led to the platform. “J. C. and I pushed one guy on the tracks,” Garry remembered. “Sarah was biting and fighting the guy. She got the worst of it.”35 Vaughan and her friends escaped on the next train, but they were hurt. After the attack Vaughan had abdominal bruises, a split lip, and a swollen eye. Still, she felt compelled to return to work. Wright’s injuries, however, confined her to bed.
Reports of Vaughan’s assault circulated in the nation’s black newspapers. The African American community was outraged. Other Café Society musicians had suffered similar attacks, and just after Vaughan and her friends were assaulted, the gang preyed on a veteran of the Tuskegee Airmen, beating him so badly that he required a lengthy hospital stay. Three weeks later bassist Slam Stewart was brutally attacked outside of the Three Deuces when the gang shifted to 52nd Street. The white gang yelled, “No Niggers on this street,” treatment familiar to musicians as they toured the South but less expected in the more cosmopolitan North. Vaughan immediately reported the incident to the police, who were already aware of the gang, but black leaders worried that nothing was being done. Prominent citizens wrote a letter of protest to the mayor. Leonard Feather called for more police protection for musicians after hours. The New York Amsterdam News decried the attacks as “race terrorism,” explaining that Greenwich Village, once a black neighborhood, had become a postwar mecca for southern whites who had brought their hatreds and prejudices with them. The white gang openly resented seeing blacks and whites mix, as often happened at Café Society.36 It was a brutal reminder that the progressive politics of Café Society did not mirror those of the country at large. If Vaughan wanted to transcend racial categories and become popular among mainstream white audiences, she still had a long road ahead of her.
Vaughan was already a minor celebrity within African American circles. The black press faithfully reported on her gigs—listing not only when and where she performed but also the prestige factor of each venue. Vaughan’s engagement at Café Society was her first major booking as a solo act, and the jazz critics loved her, so the black press heralded her run at the café as a great success, despite the mixed reception. But she was just beginning to get attention from white audiences outside of the elite intelligentsia, who so far had been some of her strongest advocates. She finally broke through into the mainstream media in July 1946 when Time magazine, likely impressed by Leonard Feather’s piece in Metronome, included her in a profile of up-and-coming vocalists. Their two-sentence blurb praised her as the “newest favorite” at Café Society, describing her as “the freshest Negro talent since Ella Fitzgerald.”37 Short, but very sweet. It was a start.
As the media paid more and more attention to Vaughan’s professional life, they also delved into her personal life. In March 1946, Down Beat reported that she had recently wed a former colleague from the Eckstine Band. The Baltimore Afro-American soon picked up the story and ran with it.38 In July, Feather asked her if she had indeed married tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons, mentioning that the two had been close friends when they worked together for Eckstine. Vaughan flatly denied the rumors, declaring that there was “plenty of time yet for marriage.”39
But, unbeknownst to Feather, she had become increasingly friendly with George Treadwell, one of her companions during the late-night subway attack. Five years older than Vaughan, Treadwell was born in New Rochelle, New York. He played trumpet in the house band at Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem in 1941 and 1942, just as the future beboppers began frequenting the club’s jam sessions. He worked in Cootie Williams’s band, the same band that backed Vaughan during her amateur-night appearance at the Apollo on October 21, 1942, for almost three years, and finally joined J. C. Heard’s house band at Café Society in 1946. At first Vaughan and Treadwell’s friendship centered on music and a desire to further their careers. After work, they often went to clubs in Harlem and on 52nd Street. “I think they fell in love on the A train,” Johnnie Garry said. “They were drawn together by their shared love of music.” Treadwell supported and encouraged Vaughan, becoming increasingly involved in her career. During Vaughan’s first recording session as a solo act with Musicraft on May 7, 1946, Treadwell was not present. He was, however, bustling behind the scenes during her next session on June 14, 1946, and led her July 18, 1946, session, playing trumpet and conducting the George Treadwell Orchestra.
“One night we went out after finishing work—we’d usually go to 52nd Street and make the rounds. George told me again what a great singer he thought I was and that I should have a manager to see that I got the right breaks,” a 1950 confessional under Vaughan’s byline (but likely written by Treadwell and her publicity team) revealed. According to the piece, which appeared in Tan Confessions, Vaughan said, “Why don’t you manage me?” Treadwell looked at Vaughan, surprised, then replied, “Sure, Sass, I’ll manage you, but it would be even better if we managed each other.” The couple got a marriage license the next morning and wed on September 17, 1946. Upon reflection, Vaughan admitted, “I guess the only trouble was that George was very slow in getting around to proposing. Several times I almost proposed to him.”40
That September, after six months of critical, if not popular, success, Josephson finally released Vaughan from her Café Society engagement. He simply needed to replace her with a more commercially viable act. Vaughan was out on her own again, and although she did not leave Café Society a star, as Josephson hoped she would and as Billie Holiday had eight years earlier, Vaughan did exit the club with valuable experience and plenty of open doors. She finished out the year in New York, keeping busy singing for jam sessions, dances, socialite parties, and clubs throughout the city. In January, she returned to the Apollo. Billed as an “award winner”—she had just won Esquire magazine’s Jazz Book award for outstanding new jazz vocalist for the upcoming year—and “famous singing record star,” Vaughan shared the spotlight with headliner Dizzy Gillespie and his band.41
Her career, however, didn’t really gain momentum until the spring of 1947. Treadwell had given up his career as a professional musician and was now onboard as Vaughan’s full-time manager. After twenty months of freelancing in New York, it was time for Vaughan to broaden her horizons and explore opportunities in a new city.