Thank you. Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen. You are so wonderful,” Vaughan shouted above the applause of 3,500 fans gathered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on November 15, 1951. They were there to hear the Biggest Show of ’51, an oversized, all-star revue headlining Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, and Vaughan. “Right here,” she continued as the crowd settled, “I’d like to do my very latest Columbia recording, and I do hope you’ve been hearing ‘I Ran All the Way Home.’”1 Released on October 12, the tune had just made its way onto the charts five days earlier. Pianist Jimmy Jones eased into the introduction. Vaughan sighed, then giggled in her high-pitched voice as the audience whistled and clapped its approval. Then she sang the melismatic intro low in her contralto range. Silence fell over the hall as she and Jones bent the languorous ballad’s tempo, first tugging, then pushing listeners through time, ultimately leading them to the final note, which she punctuated with one of her trademark vocal slides. Ellington’s band launched into Vaughan’s next number, a medley of her old Musicraft classics, all recently rereleased on MGM, beginning with the up-tempo “Mean to Me.” A brassy “Perdido” followed, and Vaughan’s set was off and running.
It was night fifty-six in a marathon of seventy one-nighters. Vaughan had been on the road with the Biggest Show of ’51 since September 21, performing once or twice a night, and she had two more weeks to go. At its heart, the Biggest Show was an old-fashioned vaudeville revue complete with music, dancing, and plenty of comedy. It resembled the live preshow entertainment found at neighborhood movie palaces, only it was bigger and much better, lasting over two hours. In addition to its three big-name stars, the show featured five supporting acts: comedians Timmie Rogers, Patterson and Jackson, and Stump and Stumpy; the Marie Bryant Dancers; and the one-legged tap dancer Peg Leg Bates. In total, there were forty-nine performers—many more than local movie theaters could ever afford.
Each night Ellington, doing double duty as emcee, kicked off the show with his classic big band compositions. He introduced the Marie Bryant Dancers, Timmy Rogers, and finally Vaughan. Night after night, she stopped the show, earning multiple curtain calls. “Sarah had what was called the choice spots,” explained pianist Jones to oral historian Patricia Wells in 1978. “She’d close the first half. There’s no pressure there. Nat Cole was the only one, King Cole was the only one that could close the second half of the show.” Vaughan learned this the hard way. On October 19, when the Biggest Show stopped in Pittsburgh, George Treadwell, Vaughan’s husband and manager, “made her late on purpose, to see if she could hold up closing the second half. That meant that if she was absent Nat would have to close the first half. Well, he learned his lesson,” remembered Jones. Treadwell’s machinations failed, and Vaughan floundered. “As much as I admire Sarah, Nat King Cole was a complete heavyweight.”2
After Cole finished his set, Vaughan returned to the stage for the grand finale: a duet with Cole. Backed by Duke’s band, Cole and Vaughan sang “Love You Madly,” a tongue-in-cheek ballad. They traded phrases with an easy, swinging camaraderie, much like the romantic banter of a couple in love. Vaughan scatted a few phrases as Cole sang the melody in the background, and here Vaughan’s voice was clearly the stronger of the two, easily overpowering Cole. It was an “argument,” or “tiff,” all done in good fun. They reunited. The music stopped, and their sung banter became spoken. “I love you madly,” said Cole, and Vaughan replied, again in her dainty, girlish voice, “Well, I love the hell out of you too, Nat.” The audience laughed. “Well, what do you know!” exclaimed Cole. Ellington, joining in the fun, said, “I just couldn’t love either of you more madly!” Vaughan giggled along with the crowd. The band began to play again as Vaughan and Cole sung it out together, and Ellington wrapped up the show for the evening.3
As soon as the curtain closed, the stagehands broke down the bandstand, the musicians packed up their instruments, the dancers and comedians changed into street clothes, and the entire cast and crew packed themselves back onto the buses to head to the next gig. If they performed only one show that night, the troupe got an early start, usually hitting the road by midnight. If, however, it was a two-show night, they didn’t leave until 4:00 A.M. Vaughan and her colleagues would chat, sleep, and eat as the bus made its way to the next town, typically two hundred and sometimes three hundred miles away. “To break the monotony, I drove our bus,” said Vaughan.4 When they arrived, they checked into a hotel, usually in the town’s black neighborhood, and got ready for their next show. Then the entire cycle began again. It must have been an exhausting yet exhilarating two and a half months. In 1954, as she prepared for the Birdland All-Stars tour, a mere twenty-nine one-nighters, she said, “It’s been a lot rougher. In 1951, we did 70 one night stands. On the 68th, we got a day off in Detroit and we all went nuts with nothing to do.”5
The tour began on Friday, September 21, with three days of warmups in Boston at the Garden. After lackluster sales, a mere $18,000 for the three-night stint, the show gained momentum as it made stops in Worcester, Providence, Troy, and Newark. On September 29 they performed two sold-out, standing-room-only shows at Carnegie Hall in New York, grossing $17,000 in a single night. The show continued its trek of one-nighters, bouncing between cities in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts, then up into Canada for a week. They set another tour record in Montreal on Sunday, October 7, with $25,000 in ticket sales. They returned to upstate New York, worked their way to Cleveland and Cincinnati; Charleston, West Virginia; Pittsburgh; Scranton; Washington, D.C.; Roanoke; and Richmond as they prepared to travel further South.
The Biggest Show of ’51 was a phenomenon, and the music industry took note. In five weeks, during its first thirty-five dates, the show grossed $351,550—the equivalent of more than $3.2 million today. Not only was it one of the first big arena shows of its kind, capable of filling large coliseums and smaller concert halls night after night, it was the first endeavor of its kind to feature an all-black cast, proving once again that black music sold. And as the troupe prepared to venture further south, industry insiders predicted that its upcoming engagements in the Southland would be its “ripest picking to date.”6
When the Biggest Show of ’51 arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, on Friday, October 26, the evening began as usual. The crew set up the stage while the headliners prepared in their dressing rooms. Outside Municipal Auditorium, a crowd of nearly five thousand gathered, and both black and white patrons waited with tickets in hand to enter through the hall’s front doors as they usually did in Atlanta. But only the white ticketholders were allowed inside. “Three gruff and menacing white policemen barred the front entrance to Negroes, using profanity and insulting remarks to those who hesitated to ‘move on’ around the corner,” the Associated Negro Press (ANP) reported.7 Atlanta’s Jim Crow laws required that theaters have separate entrances for black and white patrons. But city officials, most elected by narrow margins by black voters, usually followed a more liberal policy at the Municipal Auditorium. They didn’t enforce the side-door policy and allowed black and white audiences to enter through the front door together. That night, however, they didn’t, and black patrons were furious. It was a step backward in their ongoing fight for equality.
Black concertgoers yelled at the show’s local promoters, also black, as they made a path for the white ticket holders. The promoters tried to settle the crowd, but tensions escalated. Thirty minutes before curtain time, A. T. Walden, a prominent civic leader and lawyer who represented both the promoters and the local NAACP branch, announced: “Due to circumstances beyond our control, we regret to ask all colored people to please use the side entrance.”8
“I was shocked to learn that Negro ticket-holders were being shunted over to a side door entrance,” the wife of a well-known doctor told reporters. “Naturally, I would not voluntarily submit to such a humiliation, and I turned to my daughter and said, ‘We’ll go home.’” “It was the most disgraceful thing I’ve heard of,” a local schoolteacher fumed. “I think it’s terrible that any self-respecting Negro would ever voluntarily accept such an arrangement to witness an all-colored cast, sponsored by a Negro at that.” And the president of the Atlanta Musicians Protective Association refused to purchase a ticket. “I cannot voluntarily accept segregation of myself or my people,” he said. Others refused to buy tickets too, and according to the ANP another four hundred tore up their tickets in disgust.9
But 2,500 black music lovers “forgot race pride and accepted the Jim Crow arrangement.”10 They entered the theater and took their seats, along with 1,500 whites. While segregated entrances were uncommon, segregation within the theater was not. Atlanta city ordinances mandated that blacks and whites sit apart from one another using the so-called vertical Jim Crow pattern, which divided the theater in half from the ground floor up. Even though black patrons outnumbered whites nearly two to one and overflowed their designated sections, according to the Baltimore Afro-American, whose coverage was more disapproving, “There were 1,500 white record fans with a great big section all to themselves.”11
Backstage, the musicians didn’t know about the Jim Crow–fueled chaos outside until reporters pressured the headliners to comment. An upset Ellington snapped, “I don’t want to discuss it.” Cole refused to comment. And Vaughan, speaking through her maid, told the reporters, “This is terrible. I’ll never come South again.” She was upset, indignant even, but practical. When asked whether the show would go on, Vaughan conceded, “Everyone can’t be a Josephine Baker.”12
The famous expatriate was known for her racial advocacy. Baker, whose evocative performances thrilled Parisians during the 1920s, had made headlines two weeks earlier when waiters at the trendy Stork Club in New York refused to serve her, despite her personal invitation from the club’s owner, southerner Sherman Billingsley. Outraged, Baker left the club and told reporters, “This is a terrible experience. It is a snub to my color, to my people. It’s not just something you can let drop. It is un-American. It is not fair to other Americans.”13 She considered picketing the restaurant but pursued legal action instead. The NAACP stepped in, demanding that the liquor and cabaret licenses of the Stork Club be revoked. Middleweight boxing champion “Sugar” Ray Robinson expressed his indignation and publicly supported Baker too. Baker was bold and a master of using her celebrity in the fight for racial equality. But the stakes were comparatively low. This was one dinner, an after-work gathering of friends, and it did not directly impact Baker’s current engagement at the Roxy Theatre in New York.
When faced with racial injustice in Atlanta, Vaughan, Cole, and Ellington had a more difficult decision to make. If they refused to perform, they jeopardized their professional and financial well-being. The show carried a hefty $5,000 guarantee, and the headliners were under contract to appear. “I had no choice but to observe the terms of the contracts,” Ellington later explained to the ANP. “Refusal on my part to honor them would bring on suits for breach of contract, as well as other reprisals, the effect of which would have been to put me out of the band business.”14 In short, the livelihoods of the three headliners, not to mention the other forty-six cast members, the show’s crew, the staff supporting the stars, and all of their families, were at stake. Plus, Vaughan and her colleagues were entertainers. They didn’t want to disappoint the loyal fans who paid hard-earned money to see the show. They wanted to entertain.
The Biggest Show of ’51 did go on that night, albeit forty-five minutes late, and the headliners were criticized for their decision. The event’s promoter, whose eleventh-hour attempts to undo the segregated door policy failed, deflected responsibility onto Ellington. “If I had been Duke,” he said, “I would have refused to play and told the people why; he could afford to lose the money. . . . I couldn’t.”15 An outraged black press chastised the show’s stars for participating in, and implicitly condoning, such segregated practices. “Unlike the dynamic Josephine Baker,” wrote Cliff MacKay of the Baltimore Afro-American, “none of the artists appeared to be the least disturbed over the pungent odor of Jim Crow hanging low over the vast hall.”16 Coverage by the black press incorporated a strong editorial slant—one that promoted racial uplift, equality, and justice, while expecting similar social activism from the show’s headliners, especially Ellington. He was the elder statesman of the Biggest Show of ’51, a towering figure widely praised not only for his musical accomplishments but also for his sartorial elegance and fashion sense. The Afro-American, however, described him as wearing “a greasy stocking on his head.”17 It was an unflattering portrayal, one that diminished Ellington while reminding readers that he straightened his hair. The conch hairstyle favored by Ellington, Cole, and dozens of other black artists was very popular, and scholars have since interpreted the practice of hair straightening as a creative response to racial oppression, an expression of a “neo-African” identity that disturbed cultural norms.18 But in 1951, the Afro-American alluded to Ellington’s straightened hair as a way to suggest that he pandered and sold out to white interests—that he was not, in fact, a race man committed to racial equality.
But Ellington and the other stars of the Biggest Show were not responsible for the mess in Atlanta. They were in an impossible situation, with impossible expectations, and there were forces much larger than them at work. The white manager of Municipal Auditorium arranged for the segregated entrances and police presence. When interviewed by the black press, he was forthright, almost boastful, explaining that, due to the high price of tickets, he believed the show’s audience would be primarily white, so he reverted to the old, usually suspended, City Council Auditorium Committee regulation requiring separate doors. (According to trade publications, ticket prices for the Biggest Show were much lower than comparable shows, and this affordability contributed to the tour’s enormous success.) Others speculated that the policy change in fact reflected a power struggle between local promoters. A white promoter, known to have a virtual monopoly on booking Friday nights at Municipal Auditorium (his events always enforced the segregated entrance policy) and aspirations of entering the lucrative field of promoting black acts, schemed, likely with the help of the hall’s white manager, to undermine his competitors. Atlanta’s black political leaders demanded and received an apology from Atlanta’s white mayor, who publicly scolded the auditorium manager for his “unwise judgment.” And black leaders used this victory to tackle similar practices at other prominent venues. Atlanta would not repeal its city ordinances mandating segregation in public spaces until 1963.19
The controversy followed the Biggest Show of ’51 as it completed its tour of the South and made its way back to the Midwest. A week later, when interviewed by the ANP, Charles Carpenter, the show’s black manager, was in damage-control mode. He insisted that the unit had done “more to break down discrimination than any other organization.” In Tulsa, Oklahoma, four thousand listeners, both black and white, attended the concert. In Columbia, South Carolina, according to Carpenter, “the audience was mixed and in Fort Worth, Texas, all patrons went to the same box office.” These were small but tangible steps forward. Carpenter also expressed concerns about the NAACP’s practice of protesting African American–headlined shows, worrying that these protests inflicted great harm on the show while accomplishing little for the race. “The logical thing to do,” he said, “is to picket State capitals where the laws of segregation are made.”20
Ellington agreed. The controversy in Atlanta dogged him too, resulting in a new scandal. After a reporter in St. Louis blatantly misquoted Ellington as saying “We ain’t ready yet” for racial integration, he was forced to set the record straight and reassert his longstanding commitment to racial equality.21 “In my nearly 30 years in public life,” he responded, “no one has ever impugned my devotion to the fight for first-class citizenship.” He too disliked that “southern Negroes picketed only Negro artists, but never protested when white artists came down to play to segregated audiences. Since southern Negroes live under jimcrow all year round, why do they wait for Negro artists to come before putting on demonstrations?” He believed that combatting segregation was a full-time endeavor that required money, concluding, “Segregation is sanctioned by law in the south. We’d have to have new legislation in every state before jimcrow is completely abolished.”22
Yes, laws needed to be changed, but so did mind-sets. Little had changed since Vaughan toured the South with the Hines and Eckstine bands eight years earlier. Whites, especially southern whites, had a deeply ingrained emotional investment in white supremacy and the racism and segregation that it produced. And change was hard to enact. The unit encountered more racial hostility in Biloxi, Mississippi, as they prepared to perform for the troops at Kessler Air Force Base. As usual, the entire cast and crew stayed at a black hotel. Dick LaPalm, Nat King Cole’s white publicist, told Cole biographer Daniel Mark Epstein that members of a white supremacist group abducted him in the middle of the night. Upset that LaPalm associated so freely and intimately with blacks, the group’s members packed his bags, checked him out of the hotel, and relocated him to a white hotel. Unharmed, LaPalm rejoined the unit the next morning. Cole laughed when he learned of the incident. But as Cole’s laughter intensified, becoming louder and louder, LaPalm realized that Cole did not in fact find the situation funny. Instead, his laughter released a pent-up rage and frustration with the cruelties of racism. A furious Ellington threatened not to perform. Cole calmed Ellington, arguing that it was unfair to punish thousands of expectant servicemen because of the ignorance of a few.23
Time and again, when confronted by racial injustice, intolerance, and segregation, Cole decided to perform. “The important thing is for Negroes and whites to communicate,” he explained. “Even if they sit on separate sides of the room, maybe at intermission a white fellow will ask a Negro for a match or something, and maybe one will ask the other how he likes the show. That way, you have started them to communicating, and that’s the answer to the whole problem.”24 Cole viewed himself as a facilitator, someone who, with his music, helped bring people, both black and white, together and helped them see one another’s humanity and goodness. He hoped to help southern whites to see blacks as people too. But Cole remained pragmatic. “Those people, segregated or not, are still record fans,” he told Jet magazine in 1956, following an attempted kidnapping by angry whites in Birmingham. “They can’t overpower the law of the South, and I can’t come in on a one-night stand and overpower the law. The white come to applaud a Negro performer like the colored do. When you’ve got the respect of white and colored, you can erase a lot of things. I can’t settle the issue. If I was that good I should be President of the United States. But I can help to ease the tension by gaining the respect of both races all over the county.”25 Yet many advocates of racial equality remained unsatisfied. They chastised Cole for not doing more with his celebrity, for not being more outspoken and assertive in his disapproval.
Vaughan chose a similar approach. She was a quiet, reserved woman offstage, uncomfortable in the role of outspoken advocate. Like Cole, she used humor to deflect her discomfort and exasperation in the face of intolerance or disrespect. And although acutely aware of the injustices of Jim Crow and other forms of institutional racism, she rarely voiced her frustration by refusing to sing. Instead, she worked within an unjust system, initiating change one small step at a time. She asserted herself and her worldview onstage. Using the power of her voice, she brought people together, showing audiences, both black and white, her humanity and subjectivity, her creativity and genius. “Sometimes it’s better to do nothing, just be yourself,” Vaughan explained while telling friends about her experiences working the segregated casinos of Las Vegas. “But strongly be yourself. You respect yourself, and bit by bit you force others to respect you.”26
She did this time and again. In November 1948, not too long after becoming a regular on Dave Garroway’s show, she landed a week at the luxurious Fairmont Hotel in downtown Philadelphia. Outside, the marquee read in bold letters: “The Fairmont Hotel Proudly Presents the Divine Sarah Vaughan.” Pianist Butch Lacy remembered Vaughan telling him of her experiences at the Fairmont when they returned for a gig at the same hotel in 1980, more than thirty years later. “Oh, man. This is the place,” she said, as the memories came flooding back. She told Lacy how she walked inside with her suitcase in hand and approached the front desk and said, “I’m Sarah Vaughan.” “Oh, Miss Vaughan, we are so, so thrilled that you would be here and sing for us,” the hotel employee replied. “I know you want to go to your quarters and there’s a bellboy there who will lead you.” The bellboy took her suitcase, directed her downstairs to the basement, and walked down a long, green corridor, passing the kitchen, the boiler room, the laundry room, and other inner workings of the hotel. They finally arrived at a small room at the end of the hall. It was filled with lockers, and in the middle there was an army cot. “That’s for you,” said the bellboy. The hotel management expected Vaughan, their marquee attraction, to stay in the same room used by their black employees, the help, to change in and out of their uniforms. Vaughan refused. She calmly turned to the bellboy and said, “You take my bag and follow me.” “She goes back down the hall and up [the] steps and walks straight out of the hotel and across the street to another hotel,” said Lacy. “She used every penny of [the] money that she earned at that hotel to rent the penthouse of the hotel across the street.” He marveled at her composure and presence of mind. “She didn’t say ‘You motherfuckers,’ she said nothing.” But she still demanded to be treated with respect.27
Then again, on December 15, 1950, a year before touring with the Biggest Show of ’51, Vaughan opened at Alan Gale’s Celebrity Club in Miami Beach. She was breaking new ground, becoming one of the first African Americans to headline at a supper club in the exclusive resort community. Local laws forbade blacks from working or residing in Miami Beach, and before 1950 only a few black artists had appeared as guests of white acts. This changed during the 1950 winter season when two supper clubs, the Celebrity Club and Copa City, revised their policies and actively wooed black talent. While the Daily News, Miami’s white newspaper, was ambivalent and dismissive of “what pretends to be a new era in Miami Beach,” the black press celebrated Vaughan’s appearance, proclaiming, “Sarah Vaughan Shatters Ban on Sepia Stars at Dixie Celebrity Club.”28
Gale, a white comedian who purchased the floundering club in the fall of 1948 to showcase his talents, still headlined the dinner show along with two white supporting acts: a vocalist and brother-sister tap dancing team. Then he turned the floor over to the black talent, for what the Daily News disparagingly called a “midnight sepia festival.” Beginning at midnight, then again at 2:30 A.M., comedian Timmie Rogers, Vaughan’s future Biggest Show of ’51 costar, and the dancing Berry Brothers warmed up the crowd, followed by headliner Vaughan accompanied by George Kirby’s band. Between shows they were not allowed to mingle with white guests in the club, so they all retreated to a newly constructed room at the back of the club. Finally, early, early in the morning, after Vaughan closed the late show, a car, provided by Gale, ferried Vaughan and her fellow performers back to the black-owned-and-operated Mary Elizabeth Hotel in Miami’s black neighborhood of Overtown.
Still billed as the “most talked about voice in America,” Vaughan exceeded expectations.29 It was her first engagement this far south since touring with Billy Eckstine’s band in 1945. Local disc jockeys created buzz and excitement as they enthusiastically promoted her appearances. Reservations filled quickly, and night after night she sold out.
“I sure would like to do something nice for you,” Gale said to Vaughan. She had reinvigorated his business during her two-week appearance, and he was grateful.
“I’d like you to let my own people in,” she said.
“Okay.”
Vaughan invited her friends from Overtown to the show, and for one night a Miami Beach club was integrated. Johnnie Garry, Vaughan’s longtime road manager, remembered that night too. It was the first time he heard Vaughan perform “The Lord’s Prayer” a cappella. It was an emotional performance. Time stopped as she mesmerized her audience and moved many of them to tears. And when she finished, the audience burst into applause.30
Impresario and producer George Wein remembers Vaughan singing “The Lord’s Prayer” at Storyville, his club in Boston, to similar effect in 1952 or 1953. “We had to close at midnight exactly in Boston on Saturday nights,” Wein explained. “And so the police sent three or four tough-looking cops to make sure we shut down at midnight. So I said to Sassy, ‘Do me a favor, when I tell you, you sing a capella ‘The Lord’s Prayer’—‘Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed . . .’ I said, ‘and then just go off the stage after that.’ So it was twelve o’clock, the cops started moving toward the stage, and Sarah sang a capella ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and those cops had to stand right in their tracks, they couldn’t move. It was just wonderful and Sarah did such a great job and she knew exactly what I wanted.”31
“‘The Lord’s Prayer’ is both my favorite of the records I’ve made and the one I consider my best. It’s the only record of mine I ever play—ask George [Treadwell],” she explained in 1950. “I cut it for Musicraft around Christmas time in 1947. Ted Dale and a 22 or 23-piece orchestra, with strings, backed me. I’d always wanted to record it, but I thought I had no business doing it. Marian Anderson had recorded ‘The Lord’s Prayer,’ you know.”32 Anderson had not, in fact, recorded “The Lord’s Prayer.” Rather, in 1943 she recorded “Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child,” the B-side of Vaughan’s Musicraft release. But Anderson did send Vaughan a telegram of congratulations, which Vaughan treasured, shortly after the release of her recording of “The Lord’s Prayer.”
“I’d played it before, at church, school, or the ‘Y’ for the kids, but it was different from what I’d been doing on my records,” Vaughan explained.33 The song was a favorite of her father’s, a staple of church services, but few vocalists had recorded Albert Hay Malotte’s setting of “The Lord’s Prayer.” The white opera singer John Charles Thomas, a baritone, recorded it in 1936, followed more than a decade later by Leonard De Paur, a black choral director and composer, leading his Infantry Chorus in 1947. But it was unusual for a vocalist known for jazz and pop to delve into religious music, and Vaughan’s disc was controversial. A handful of detractors believed that it was wrong, sacrilegious even, for a secular artist to record serious, sacred music. Treadwell defended Vaughan in the Philadelphia Tribune. “Don’t they know that Sarah sang in the choir of the Mount Zion Baptist church in Newark for nine years before she ever had any idea of doing popular singing?” he asked. “Regardless of her background, is there anything wrong with a singer attempting a serious work, provided he or she can render a competent performance? Just because Sarah is identified with jazz and popular singing is no reason for her to be barred from doing anything else.”34
For Vaughan, “The Lord’s Prayer” was an expression of her worldview, one grounded in her faith and days as a choir girl in Newark. It was an example of her desire not to be pigeonholed or typecast, her insistence on maintaining her artistic freedom and flexibility, and her delight in defying expectations. “The Lord’s Prayer” became a staple of her live performances well into the 1950s. In November 1951, while touring with the Biggest Show of ’51, a Newark DJ asked Vaughan why she included religious numbers like “The Lord’s Prayer” in her repertoire, and she simply said, “I like to sing and I like to pray. That way I kill two birds with one stone.”35
When Vaughan, christened the “Divine One” by Dave Garroway, sang “The Lord’s Prayer,” she reminded her audiences, both black and white, of their common ground, a shared faith and humanity. It was a message of love and peace, forgiveness and reconciliation, a way to forge a connection with her listeners while infusing her performances with dignity and respect, even in the face of power and intolerance. When Vaughan performed “The Lord’s Prayer” in Philadelphia at Robin Hood Dell, Miami Beach at the Celebrity Club, Boston at Storyville, and countless other anonymous clubs and concert halls, she symbolized American democracy and the promise of interracial harmony while simultaneously challenging these democratic principles. As scholar Farrah Griffin explains, in these moments of reconciliation, the black female voice functions as a hinge. For white audiences, black female voices heal a fractured and divided country. They represent an idealized, peaceful vision of America, one that values national unity and racial equality. For black audiences, however, the black female voice is a potent challenge to the status quo. It exposes the larger, more fundamental crisis underlying this spectacle of national unity. Vaughan, like Marian Anderson before her, reminded audiences that there was still much to be done. Even though she was never an outspoken civil rights activist like fellow vocalists Lena Horne, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, or Nina Simone, through her singing, Vaughan helped create spaces for resistance.36
Her performances of “The Lord’s Prayer” joined those of Mahalia Jackson, who recorded it in 1950, and Anderson, who sang it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. And in many ways, Vaughan’s performances of “The Lord’s Prayer” were precursors to the performative prayer so effectively used by protestors during the civil rights movement. In the face of violence and retaliation, activists knelt down and began to pray, often reciting the Lord’s Prayer. In these moments of divine connection, they stopped police in their tracks, just as Vaughan did that Saturday night at Storyville in 1952. Protestors tapped into a shared faith and collection of values and morals while simultaneously revealing the desperation, absurdity, and, ultimately, violence of segregationists. And as religious historian Tobin Miller Shearer explains, “Black bodies praying in public manifested freedom.”37 Vaughan’s singing manifested freedom too. It was how she expressed herself in the face of intolerance and the way she brought about social change, night after night.
But in order to bring about this change, to reach the white audiences that frequented the swanky supper clubs, hotel lounges, and movie palaces, Vaughan needed to transform her public image. She needed, ironically enough, to cultivate a public persona that emphasized her femininity and role as a homemaker. And she needed to look the part. During the Columbia years, Vaughan transformed herself into a glamorous and sophisticated beauty. She became, at least in the public’s imagination, a lady in the mold of Grace Kelly, only cooler, hipper, with a touch of attitude befitting her other nickname, “Sassy.”