If New York City was the jazz capital of the United States, Chicago came in a close second, especially in the 1920s. After World War I, African American musicians flocked to Chicago from New Orleans and elsewhere. Louis Armstrong, for example, went from being an anonymous sideman to become a big-name soloist after he moved to Chicago in 1924 and recorded his game-changing “Hot Five” and “Hot Seven” sides. Pianist Earl Hines, Vaughan’s former boss, had similar success in Chicago. Aspiring white musicians also gravitated to the Midwest metropolis in search of financial security and artistic opportunities; the so-called Chicago style, practiced by Eddie Condon, Bix Beiderbecke, and Jimmy McPartland, originated there, and swing bandleaders Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa were born and raised in Chicago. The city was a creative hub. It boasted thriving club scenes in the black South Side neighborhoods as well as the downtown core and white suburbs. There were plenty of good paying gigs, a strong record label presence, an extensive network of radio stations fronted by outspoken, jazz-loving disc jockeys, and, perhaps most important, enthusiastic, knowledgeable audiences with keen ears for new, experimental music. It was an ideal proving ground for an innovative, cutting-edge artist like Vaughan, who now had a growing number of records to her name.
So when Vaughan opened at the Rhumboogie Club, in the heart of the South Side, on March 21, 1947, she became a sensation.1 Before her arrival, the club, co-owned by boxing champion Joe Louis, struggled to make ends meet. Drummer Floyd Campbell remembered receiving his paycheck on a Friday with instructions not to cash it until Monday. “But Sarah packed the place every night,” he said. “They had to send out for extra chairs to accommodate the patrons.” When her original four-week contract ended, Treadwell, embracing his new role as her manager, insisted that the club management more than double Vaughan’s pay. “At first they refused,” said Campbell. “Then Ziggy Johnson, the show’s producer, and I threatened to pull the band out if they didn’t agree. They did give her the raise and they doubled the length of her engagement from four to eight weeks.”2 Not too long after Vaughan’s run ended on May 15, the Rhumboogie closed its doors for good.
During her run, Dave Garroway, a white DJ at the local NBC affiliate, trekked over to the South Side every night after his midnight show to listen to Vaughan. He fell completely in love with her voice—its beauty, prowess, and ingenuity—and became one of her biggest fans. “People were telling me about him praising me before I knew Dave,” Vaughan told Down Beat’s Don Gold in 1957.3 “He actually made me very famous in Chicago,” Vaughan told Dick Cavett in 1980. “I was working at a club called the Rhumboogie, and I was making $250 a week. And he used to talk about me on the radio all of the time. Constantly. And I would hear about it. And then when I met him, I was on his show all of the time. My salary went from $250 to $750. And I bought my first car.”4
During her tenure at the Rhumboogie, Garroway also organized two special concerts showcasing Vaughan, both of which sold out. “The atom smasher in this case was Sarah’s singing,” Down Beat raved in their review of her first Garroway-sponsored concert on April 13. “Sarah’s use of her voice is a musical miracle as well as a paradox. . . . Nearly 600 patrons sat enthralled while La Vaughan opened her mouth wide and molded her tones into exquisite phrases.”5 During her second concert, held at the Civic Opera House on May 4, they reported, Vaughan had the “crowd in the palm of her hand,” and even though she only sang five songs, she could have gone on all night.6
By the end of April, six weeks after arriving in town, sales of Vaughan’s records soared in Chicago; she made two guest appearances on Nat King Cole’s nationally broadcast radio program; and on May 17, after closing at the Rhumboogie, she was picked up for three weeks at the Sherman Hotel. The Sherman was a grandiose establishment in the heart of the Loop’s theater district. In less than three months Vaughan went from singing for in-the-know jazz aficionados at a near-bankrupt club on the South Side to performing for affluent, mainstream audiences, often dubbed “squares” for their lack of hip jazz savvy, in downtown Chicago.
The floor show at the Sherman was part of a revue series featuring up-and-coming recording artists, and freelance disc jockey Linn Burton, another Vaughan devotee, emceed and used his radio program as a promotional tie-in. She shared the bill with three white acts: the Harmonicats, the Herbie Fields orchestra, and pianist Mel Henke. While the Chicago Defender hailed Vaughan’s appearances at the Sherman as a triumph, explaining it was “the first time an attraction has enjoyed such an elevation in booking,” Billboard’s review made it clear that Vaughan was still finding her footing with this new, more commercial audience.7 She struggled to hold the room and to be heard above the chatter of diners. The room was too large, the PA system inadequate, and her singing too esoteric. Vaughan executed “some amazing variations, worthy of the top instrumentalists, but she needs a smaller room and a sharper crowd to register properly,” Billboard’s Johnny Sippel wrote. “In playing square spots, she’d do well to give out with an occasional novelty to break the routine of just straight standards.” Yet she “warmed up the room by the time she finished, hitting especially hard with a smile giving the impression that she’s getting a real kick from working.”8
But Vaughan’s rise in Chicago was controversial, especially the role that disc jockeys played in her growing fame. Dave Garroway’s admiration was so effusive and consistent that many assumed there was an intimate relationship between the two. “He praised me so much, some of his listeners thought we were married,” Vaughan told Down Beat’s Don Gold in 1957. “It was the kind of support you can’t pay for.”9 And Garroway was but one in a quartet of Chicago disc jockeys advocating for Vaughan. Ernie Simon of WJJD, Eddie Hubbard of WIND, and freelancer Linn Burton, who emceed the floor show at the Sherman, all embraced their roles as taste makers and all used their platforms to voice their enthusiasm, praise, and unflinching support for the promising vocalist. And they played her records all of the time, often at the expense of other artists.
Disc jockeys, the so-called maestros of radio, were growing in importance, popularity, and influence. After World War II, radio transitioned from a national to a local medium. The number of independent radio stations exploded from a mere 56 in 1945 to 916, 44 percent of all radio stations, in 1950. As the role of the national radio networks like NBC and CBS declined, the influence of disc jockeys, especially those affiliated with small, independent stations, skyrocketed. DJs excelled at understanding emerging and niche markets within their communities, and these new markets often centered on what was known as race music. They guided the musical interests of their listeners, introducing them to new music, but also responded to listener requests. (The most popular DJs received copious mail, and eager fans often overloaded telephone switchboards during call-in segments.) DJs developed new, listener-friendly formats, sponsored fan-directed listening clubs, organized popularity polls to rank favorite artists, and worked in tandem with local record stores, placing top-selling discs on high rotation. It was a symbiotic relationship between DJ and community, and the most popular DJs became local celebrities that produced concerts and sponsored civic charities.10
Garroway, for instance, forged a partnership with Hudson-Ross, Chicago’s self-proclaimed leading record, radio, and appliance store chain. The program notes for Vaughan’s April 13, 1947, concert sponsored by Garroway’s 11:60 Club included an advertisement listing Vaughan’s latest recordings, all of which could be found at one of Hudson-Ross’s three downtown locations. And newspaper ads for the store included endorsements from Garroway. An advertisement announcing an in-store appearance by Vaughan on Friday, September 12, 1947, quoted Garroway using what had become familiar rhetoric: “Come and meet Sarah Vaughan, the crystalline, iridescent singing star of Musicraft Records! Get her autograph on any, or all, of those very non-repulsive Musicraft Records which seem alive with little golden sparks. I’ll be there too!” He became the store’s public voice, promoting Vaughan and his aesthetic agenda, all while selling records and, ultimately, himself. He emerged as a local celebrity, becoming an early television personality in Chicago and eventually the host of NBC’s nationally broadcast Today Show in 1951.
Members of the established mainstream press pushed back. During Vaughan’s appearances at the Sherman Hotel, Chicago Sun columnist Dale Harrison, known for his more conservative, “square” tastes, wrote that he simply didn’t like Sarah Vaughan and suggested that “the comely Negro chanteuse isn’t the great talent they say she is.” Angry Vaughan fans wrote letters calling him an “unmitigated moron,” another insisted that he was “one of those impoverished souls” incapable of appreciating true art, and another worried that his remarks would keep “a lot of the unintelligent and uninformed squares who read your column” from hearing Vaughan. DJ Ernie Simon leapt to Vaughan’s defense, questioning Harrison’s musical integrity. Harrison responded with his own ad hominem attacks and dubbed Ernie Simon “Simple Simon.” He discussed Garroway too, and although he considered Garroway “one of the less confused jocks,” Harrison questioned his enthusiasm for Vaughan and added that “the sense of power which has descended suddenly on the disc maestri has led them sometimes in desperation to touting new singers they believe can be hoisted to the heights with a little platter-playing push.” And he concluded, “[Garroway] has given [Vaughan] one of the most determined and persistent buildups any new singer ever had—combining his own persuasiveness with the 50,000-high class watts of NBC’s WMAQ.” This was indeed a powerful signal: Garroway’s reach extended beyond Chicago and its suburbs, and his programs became a favorite of high school and university students as far away as North Carolina and New York.11
It’s possible, however, that Dale Harrison’s dislike of Vaughan and the DJs who supported her was not simply a case of professional jealousy or anxiety that he and his fellow newspapermen were being eclipsed as influential tastemakers. Perhaps Harrison was also uncomfortable with how Garroway and like-minded DJs discussed Vaughan’s voice. How they used powerful imagery and rhetoric to frame the listening experiences of their many devoted fans. And how this in turn blurred racial boundaries.
On September 21, 1947, four months after her breakthrough performances in Chicago, Vaughan returned to Garroway’s popular radio show on WMAQ, NBC’s Chicago affiliate. She had just spent two successful months in Los Angeles, and on her way back east she made another stop in Chicago. She was in the middle of a six-week engagement at Al Sherman’s Club Silhouette on the North Side. Garroway emceed at the club, and as he often did, he invited the headliner to appear on his radio show. His broadcasts mixed live, in-studio performances with his musings on art and life. That night he described a man he’d seen with hinges tattooed on his arms and the marvels of modern engineering that created the Bonneville Dam. While introducing Vaughan, he assumed the role of a museum curator or docent and likened Vaughan’s singing to a beautiful piece of art. He explained that good art, much like a good book, makes you feel warm, and you feel warmer longer by sharing your discovery with others.
“That is very much the position I am in now,” he said. “Here is a girl named Sarah Vaughan, who sings with exceeding grace and transparent beauty. Her voice is rich, moist, and filled with tiny gold filaments. A slim girl on the threshold of one of the great careers in music, I think.” Then he instructed his listeners to sit down and “close your eyes and open your mind to a new gossamer sound.” He never mentioned Vaughan’s race, and instead encouraged listeners to remove sight, and by extension skin color and the physical body (in other words, the visual clues usually used to determine race), from their listening experience. He asked them to set aside their inhibitions and prejudices, to relax and completely immerse themselves in the pleasures of Vaughan’s voice.
Then she sang. Backed by piano and studio orchestra, she began with “Tenderly,” a romantic ballad by Walter Gross and Jack Lawrence that she recorded two months earlier for Musicraft. It would become a personal favorite of Garroway’s, and in those early years he often called Vaughan, asking her to sing “Tenderly” to his wife over the phone. That night her tempo was slow. Her voice was full and deep, near the bottom of her contralto register and enveloped by a languorous vibrato. She sang the last note. Garroway paused and exclaimed, “Now you know it is possible to feel hot and cold at the same time.”
“My progressive guest stars, I know, are not supposed to sing two songs in a row. But they are not Sarah Vaughan,” he said. “If you have not heard Sarah sing ‘It Might as Well Be Spring,’ you are about to look closely at the face of beauty.” Penned by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for the 1945 film State Fair, “It Might as Well Be Spring” won an Academy Award for Best Original Song and became a hit for crooner Dick Haymes. Vaughan recorded it for Crown Records in January 1946 with John Kirby’s orchestra, the same band she played with at the Copacabana, and it soon became one of her signature songs too. She “sings this utterly differently,” Garroway explained, reaching the “depths of tenderness” while evoking a “daintiness” and “delicacy” and the “freshness of a yellow crocus.”
“That, my starling, is as about as transcendent as we’re going to get,” Garroway sighed as she finished. Then he gave his radio audience a tutorial on how to listen to Vaughan’s bebop-infused singing. He turned their attention to the final bars of the tune, where she improvised and sang wordlessly, like an instrumentalist, outlining the song’s chords, often only alluding to the melody. “Did you hear, or could your mind hear as your ear did, the convolutions of image in that later part? Where she does adhere to the framework of the melody but twists and convolutes it in a way never heard before?”
“Sarah, will you breathe into that again?” he asked. Vaughan sang the final verse, once again demonstrating the now-iconic slides, passing tones, and arpeggios she added to the tune’s tag. It was a demonstration of the vocal prowess, technical proficiency, and pure tone she was becoming known for, not to mention her unique creative vision and genius. When she finished, Garroway sighed his signature phrase, “Peace.”12
Vaughan’s segment lasted seven, perhaps eight, minutes. On the surface, Garroway simply shared his favorite new artist, an artist he believed paired modern innovation and exquisite beauty, with his listeners. But the way he discussed her voice, the language he used, did not conform to the conventions of the day. Many of his white contemporaries used different language when talking about black female vocalists in an effort, perhaps subconscious, to maintain clear boundaries between the music sung by black vocalists and the music of white vocalists. In a sense, Dave Garroway broke the rules.
In the 1940s and 1950s, it was still taboo for whites and blacks to intermingle, especially in the deeply segregated South, and radio broadcasts, recordings, and jukeboxes presented an unsettling opportunity for this to happen. Unlike live performances, where racial identity was self-evident, sound recordings separated voices from the physical bodies that created them. Race became obscured as disembodied voices interacted with listeners with little mediation. A white singer could sound “black,” and a black singer could sound “white.” And a white man might listen to the radio and unwittingly form an attachment to a black singer, like Garroway so clearly (albeit knowingly) had. To minimize this danger of listening across racial boundaries, a sonic miscegenation of sorts, white critics developed a code, a way of discussing voices that helped listeners determine the racial identity of the performer, a way to know if they were hearing a black voice or a white voice.
White critics focused on vocal timbre, describing the many nuances of sound that defined a voice’s grain and texture, its unique aural fingerprint. They assigned certain vocal qualities and timbres to specific genres and styles, which happened to be informed by race. Just like producer John Hammond, most white critics of the day considered the blues the only true, or “authentic,” form of black musical expression, and they equated blues singing with vocal blackness. According to these critics, blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey possessed deep, full-powered voices that were throaty, husky, and gritty. Their voices were primal, with an earthy zest. And because they were often referred to as “shouters,” blues singers were expected to growl, sob, and belt out their tunes.
Girl singers were their opposite. While plenty of black girl singers worked in the 1930s and 1940s, Vaughan included, the designation “girl singer” became a way for white critics to discuss vocal whiteness. The voices of girl singers were dainty, pure, and warm; smooth and melodic; natural yet refined. The industry also used a collection of bird metaphors when discussing girl singers, referring to them as chirps, chicks, thrushes, and canaries. They chirped, peeped, and warbled. Like birds, they sang softly, sweetly, and eloquently with agile, flexible voices that were light, ephemeral, and buoyant. Of course, the vocabulary developed by white critics to differentiate black and white voices was informed by larger social and cultural constructions defining ideal beauty and womanhood, race and gender. White voices were conventionally beautiful, effortlessly feminine, and ladylike, while black voices were not.
Black critics, however, did not make these distinctions. They didn’t have a system of code words to distinguish blues shouters from girl singers, black voices from white voices. Unlike many of their white counterparts, they rarely conflated genre with race. Instead, they worked to break down and expand the labels and stylistic differences that white critics took such care to delineate. Black critics used the same vocabulary white critics often reserved for white vocalists to describe both black and white vocalists. They referred to blues singers as both shouters and chirpers, instilling the blues voice with a lyricism, clarity, and purity, a beauty and grace absent in descriptions written by white critics. In the process, they released the black voice from the confines of the body of the performer, describing blues voices as delicate, light, and effervescent, just like the voices of girl singers.
With their carefully chosen language, many white critics worked to reembody the black voices heard on the radio and sound recordings. By portraying blues singing as a sweaty, physical endeavor that required a throaty, full voice, they encouraged listeners to imagine the body of the singer, which reintroduced race into the listening equation. This created physical and mental barriers, a distance between listener and performer. It discouraged intimacy and closeness. It helped listeners reduce black performers to a collection of stereotypes, which in turn downplayed, and potentially eliminated, their individuality and humanity.
As cultural historian Richard Dyer explains in his discussion of embodiment and race, “Black people can be reduced (in white culture) to their bodies and thus to race, but white people are something else that is realized in and yet is not reducible to the corporeal, or racial.” He further explains that “the embodied something else of whiteness” manifests itself in the “spirit”—the possession of a soul, humanity, enterprise, and agency.13 White performers were more than just their bodies. They were skilled, rather than intuitive, artists with complex worldviews, thoughts, and dynamic emotions, and the white voice was constructed as possessing these attributes too. These were the qualities that made them human. The white voice was endowed with warmth, purity, kindness, and compassion. It became a sonic representation of their spirits. But this was not the case for the voices of black female singers, whose voices typically lacked spiritual qualities.
During his radio broadcasts, Dave Garroway, however, did not reduce Vaughan to her body. He did not describe her singing as throaty or overly physical; rather, it was ethereal, transcendent, and delicate—“a new gossamer sound.” It was beautiful and feminine, warm and sensuous, vibrant and brilliant, and strikingly modern, rather than primitive or intuitive. He also endowed her voice with a spirit. At the end of her segment, when he asked her to resing the tag of “It Might as Well Be Spring,” he said, “Breathe into that again,” invoking powerful biblical imagery. In Genesis, God breathes life into man so that he could become a living soul. Here Vaughan breathed life into her songs. Her voice became a life force, a representation of her soul and spirit. Garroway had in effect granted Vaughan that intangible, almost magical “embodied something else of whiteness.” In 1947, he also began calling Vaughan “the Divine One,” a nod to another “Divine Sarah,” the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt. In a sense, Garroway elevated Vaughan to the status of a deity, suggesting that like God, the spirit and creator, Vaughan and her voice resided in the heavenly and celestial spheres.
In many respects, Garroway’s description of Vaughan’s voice more closely resembled those of vocal whiteness than vocal blackness, at least as defined by white critics of the day. This is not to say that Vaughan’s voice sounded white or that it wasn’t black enough. Her singing, grounded in the bebop aesthetic and years singing in her church choir, was undeniably a form of cultural expression rooted in her experiences as a black woman. Nor was Vaughan beholden to Dave Garroway and other influential white critics like Leonard Feather for her successes. She insisted, after all, on singing the way that she wanted, even in the face of adversity. Rather, Garroway was so captivated by her innovation, the beauty of her voice, and her exhilarating performances that he set his prejudices and preconceptions aside. And by promoting a boundary-free style of listening, one that sought to eliminate racial, emotional, and ultimately intellectual barriers, he encouraged his audience to do the same.
Disc jockeys set the tone for the conversation about Vaughan’s voice—beginning in Chicago and then nationally. Fellow Chicago DJ and Vaughan enthusiast Linn Burton started referring to her as “the Vaughan that comes up like thunder” whenever he played her discs. It was a vivid image borrowed from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Mandalay,” popularized by its song adaptation “The Road to Mandalay” during the 1920s. The original line read: “The dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay.” In Burton’s reimagining, Vaughan was the sun: brilliant and dazzling, a symbol of strength, clarity, and life force. She was the dawn and the beginning of a new day—a new era of popular music. Burton’s catchphrase had legs, and it was soon adopted by both the white jazz press and the national black popular press.
As she toured, she made the rounds of the local radio stations, just as she had in Chicago, appearing on dozens, and likely hundreds, of disc jockey shows. She would sing, sometimes for an in-studio audience, chat with the disc jockey, plug her most recent releases and current gig, and then, smiling happily beside the DJ, pose for pictures, which then appeared in local and national publications. A town’s most popular jockeys often emceed Vaughan’s local engagements and sometimes broadcast her concerts live, resulting in even more publicity and exposure. Soon DJs across the country began referring to Vaughan as “the New Sound,” an epithet that referred to both her innovative, modern bebop stylings and the quality of her voice: its extraordinary beauty, elegance, and lushness. It was a voice unlike any heard before. Soon advertisements and posters announcing Vaughan’s performances billed her as “The Most Talked About Voice in America.”
Before her successes in Chicago, Vaughan struggled to find consistent work. After, she was booked solid. As 1947 came to a close, she had been working nonstop since March, ten whole months, and there was no break in sight. Years later, when asked about her grueling schedule early on, Vaughan acknowledged: “Oh, it was rough. You know, you had maybe three or four shows a night during the week, and four or five on the weekends. And we’re doing loads and loads of one-nighters, and loads and loads of clubs, and loads and loads of loudness, and loads and loads of drunkenness, and loads and loads of no money. But it was still fun. Now that it’s over!”14
Her demanding schedule did begin to pay off. In 1947, she emerged onto the national music scene, capping off the year by winning annual popularity polls sponsored by the leading trade magazines. Both the editors and readers of Metronome voted Vaughan the best female vocalist, black or white, without a band in their year-end poll for 1947. Readers of Down Beat and Orchestra World bestowed similar honors; in March 1948, the predominantly black readers of the Pittsburgh Courier selected Vaughan as their favorite female vocalist, upending perennial favorite Ella Fitzgerald, and in April Vaughan was voted the most promising female vocalist of the year in Billboard’s 10th Annual College Poll.15 It was an impressive sweep that symbolized both her acceptance by the jazz establishment and a changing of the guard—from the old-school, more traditional swing of the war years to the postwar modernism of bebop. Her Down Beat win, in particular, was an upset over the previous year’s winner, Peggy Lee, a platinum blonde queen of swing and former darling of Benny Goodman’s big band, the same band responsible for making swing music popular with white, mainstream audiences in 1939. In the 1947 survey, Vaughan scored 1,192 votes in the readers’ poll in comparison to Lee’s 870. Although relatively few readers participated in the polls, the results made national headlines, and the awards, usually plaques, were presented on national radio broadcasts with photos of the award ceremonies circulated in the national press.
As Vaughan’s popularity grew, she not only furthered her own career; she also brought more attention to bebop and the cohort of musicians she had worked with in the Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine bands, many of whom still struggled to find a wider audience. On April 18, 1948, she and saxophonist Charlie Parker launched a twenty-one-city tour of concert halls throughout the Midwest and East Coast. Sponsored by Norman Granz’s popular Jazz at the Philharmonic series, the concerts focused on bebop and also included tenor saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Flip Phillips, trumpeter Red Rodney, guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Tommy Potter, and drummer Stan Levy backing the headliners. Importantly, Sarah Vaughan, also accompanied by pianist Jimmy Jones, received top billing. Despite the prominence of Charlie Parker in modern histories of bebop and jazz, in 1948 Vaughan’s fame surpassed Parker’s. She was the main draw. Ads and marquees listed her name above his. Concert previews made only passing mention of Parker and the other instrumentalists, focusing instead on Vaughan, who, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer, was “the nation’s number one record personality; with such sides as ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ ‘Love Me or Leave Me,’ and ‘Body and Soul’ leading dozens more of her platters.”16 And in reviews it was Vaughan, not Parker, who stood out. “That Sarah Vaughan, by the way, is everything that’s been claimed for her. What a goose pimple–raising song stylist she is!” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette proclaimed following her April 22 appearance. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch deemed her the “most artistic performer” of the night on April 30.17 And according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s reviewer, the troupe’s May 4 concert “served to introduce bebop, the newest art form of jazz, to Milwaukee.” He acknowledged the contributions of Parker and his instrumental colleagues, “a group of top technicians,” then declared Vaughan the star of the evening, concluding, “The show was really stopped by Sarah Vaughan, a brown gal in a white gown that sparkled with sequins. Her voice sparkled even more and frequently went off on the tangents with which Miss Vaughan has insinuated herself among the country’s top vocalists.”18
Time and again, Vaughan’s singing introduced new audiences to the world of jazz and her favorite corner of that world, bebop. Her voice was a gateway of sorts. By 1948, however, she was beginning to reach beyond this world. Her appeal was expanding and her audience growing. In May, four New York DJs selected Vaughan, the only African American on the bill, to headline a stage show at the Strand Theatre, one of the city’s grand movie palaces. It was her first show on Broadway, the so-called Great White Way, and, according to the black press, hundreds of young fans crowded the Strand’s stage door each night seeking her autograph. During the show’s two-week run, members of Vaughan’s regional fan clubs presented her with a thoroughbred boxer they named Vaughanderful and she later renamed Baron von Ludwig.19 In August, listeners selected Vaughan to headline another DJ show, organized by Garroway and his Vaughan-loving colleagues, at the Chicago Theatre. In November, members of DJ Graeme Zimmer’s Music Makers Club in Columbus, Indiana, selected “I’ll Wait and Pray,” recently rerecorded by Vaughan for Musicraft, as their favorite disc of the month, and Zimmer played it daily. Six months later they voted Vaughan their favorite girl singer in Zimmer’s semiannual popularity poll. She beat out darlings Doris Day and Jo Stafford. And in perhaps the most unusual sign of her growing popularity, that spring the black press reported that police were searching for a Sarah Vaughan fan following a robbery at a record store in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Aside from the cash in the register, the thief limited his spoils to the store’s complete inventory of Vaughan records, some 250 discs.20
This changing of the guard also coincided with a larger shift in both the music industry and American society. As the United States recovered from World War II, life began to return to normal. Women who had entered the workforce at the call of Rosie the Riveter relinquished their factory jobs to men home from the war and resumed their prewar lives of domesticity. At the same time, a boom in manufacturing generated unprecedented economic growth, newfound prosperity, and a thriving consumer culture. Fashion became less austere, and more glamorous and sophisticated, as the “New Look” swept across the country. Travel became easier. More people owned cars, and the government built new roads and developed the country’s network of interstate highways. These roads, in turn, facilitated “white flight,” the migration of financially comfortable white families from crowded cities to the open expanses of newly created suburbs.
As the country’s population shifted away from urban centers, so did the patrons for live music. Audiences shrank as radio, then television, became more and more popular. The huge urban dance halls, known for their battles of the bands and hordes of jitterbuggers during the war years, were replaced by smaller, more intimate nightclubs and supper clubs—the perfect venue for trios or quartets fronted by a vocalist. In short, the era of the big band was over and the era of the big-name singer had arrived. Vaughan, with her “New Sound,” was poised to take advantage of this changing musical landscape.