It was in October of 1942 when I stepped up on the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre on amateur night, a shy 18-year-old, and sang ‘Body and Soul,’” Vaughan continued in her piece for USA Today. “I remember the feeling of triumph when I won the contest (first prize, $10), and thinking to myself, ‘I really can do this. I really can move people with my singing.’”
In the years since, she had traveled the world, singing to hundreds of thousands. Her forty-seven years in music had been a whirlwind of wonderful musicians, family, friends, loving audiences, successful recordings, honors, and adventures. She expressed her gratitude to her fans, who she believed had given her far more than she had ever given them. And then she closed her essay, her final farewell, proclaiming one last time, “I think today I’m singing better than ever. And I believe with all my heart that the best is yet to come.”1
Without yielding any of her typical (almost defiant) optimism, Vaughan thanked her fans and, in a sense, said goodbye. But she never revealed that she was dying from lung cancer. At the end of February, newspapers across the country reported that Vaughan had been admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for treatment of the cancer in her hand. A hospital spokesperson said that the cancer was not serious and that Vaughan expected to leave the hospital soon. A month later, in March, similar reports circulated again. Vaughan was resting at home after another hospital stay and planned to return to work on April 2 for her recording session with Quincy Jones and George Duke.
“Producer George Duke and I did our best to keep Sarah Vaughan alive by planning a Brazilian LP; it was her favorite kind of music,” Quincy Jones wrote in his autobiography. They first worked together in Paris in 1958, when he produced Vaughan with Voices. “She wanted to sing Ivan Lin’s ‘Dinorah.’ George and I played songs on cassette while she lay in a hospital bed at Cedars [Sinai Hospital] dying of cancer.”2 They tossed around ideas and worked out lead sheets as Vaughan’s mother, daughter, and old friend June Eckstine, Billy Eckstine’s first wife, looked on, helplessly. “There was nothing they could do, but she was determined to make a record. Determined,” said Richards, concluding, “Singing was everything. She was a singer.”3
In the final months of her life, Vaughan was in and out of the hospital and continued to keep the public, and many of her longtime friends, in the dark. Vocalist Carmen McRae visited Vaughan at home near the end. They reminisced about their careers, shared experiences, and friendship, dating back to the 1940s. “She never said a word about anything, but you could see she wasn’t herself,” said McRae. “She was in pain from walking up the steps.” Vaughan was a private woman, and according to her manager, Harold Levy, the man responsible for circulating press releases, she didn’t want people to know how much pain she was in.4 “Word was kept away from us,” explained vocalist Joe Williams, another longtime friend. He first worked with Vaughan during the grueling Birdland Tours with the Count Basie band in the 1950s. “That’s probably how she wanted it. She was always in charge, that girl.”5
Billy Eckstine, however, did know that his musical soulmate, his dear friend since 1942, was very sick. And Vaughan desperately wanted to see him. “Is B. coming?” she asked every day. Richards called Eckstine two, perhaps three times, asking him, then pleading with him to come for one last visit. It would make her so happy, he said. But Eckstine refused. “No, I can’t,” he said. “I can’t see her like this.”6
Complications forced Vaughan to return to the hospital on Saturday, March 31. She missed her recording session on Monday and decided the next day that she would be more comfortable at home. As she left the hospital for the last time, when no more could be done, she called Jones and reassured him, “Don’t worry, I won’t disappoint you. I can sing lying down.”7
Sarah Lois Vaughan died on Wednesday, April 4, 1990, at 9:20 P.M. Her mother and daughter were at her side. She was sixty-six.
When the city of Newark learned of Vaughan’s passing, it draped city hall in purple bunting and flew flags at half-mast. On Sunday, April 8, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra presented a farewell concert in her honor. And on Monday, her funeral was held at Mount Zion Baptist Church, where it had all begun. “A Newark girl comes home, having gone full circle, and what a circle that has been,” said the Reverend Granville Seward as he addressed nearly a thousand mourners who crowded into the church to pay their respects. Speakers broadcast the service to hundreds more gathered outside, and then they all watched as a horse-drawn carriage carried Vaughan through the streets of Newark one last time.8
In the coming months and years, there would be more memorial concerts as her friends, the musicians who worked with her, paid tribute to her life in music. Then the musical tributes, songs and albums began to appear. In 1990, Vaughan’s former pianist Bob James composed “Wings for Sarah.” “It was my tribute to a memory that I had that I learned so much from,” he explained. “I learned many, many, many things from her, but one of the things I felt that I learned the most was about tempo.” Vaughan loved to sing ballads very slowly, slower than James had ever done before. “Sometimes I felt like I could take a nap in between beat one and beat two,” he joked. “And it still might not be slow enough for her.” It was his job to set the tempo of each tune as he played his introduction. If he got it right, she would be comfortable, settle in, and explore. “But if I got it wrong, I would get the wings,” he said. Vaughan kept time with her shoulder blades and arms. If she was unhappy with a tempo, she’d gently move her arms and elbows up and down, to show the trio, who was behind her, where the beats should be going, which tempo was right for her. “So having had such fond memories of that and learning the power of setting [the] tempo right and attributing it all to Sarah Vaughan, I decided somewhere down the line to write a song about it called ‘Wings for Sarah,’” James said. “It was also about the time that I was imagining her in heaven, hopefully listening to this piece.”9
In 1991, Carmen McRae, Vaughan’s friend since 1943, released Sarah: Dedicated to You. After singing a dozen of Vaughan’s best-known and best-loved tunes, all backed by pianist Shirley Horn, McRae concluded with a new tune, “Sarah,” penned by Carroll Coates. She sang of Vaughan’s time on earth, the power and meaning of her voice, then imagined Bessie Smith and other vocal greats welcoming Vaughan to heaven. The album was a love letter to her dear friend. “I am honored to have the opportunity to pay homage to such a great lady,” wrote McRae in the album’s liner notes. “I miss you, Sass.” McRae was devastated by Vaughan’s passing; her health soon declined, forcing her to retire, and Dedicated to You was her last album. In 1993, both Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Eckstine passed away, followed by McRae in 1994 and Ella Fitzgerald two years later. It was the end of an era.
In the coming decades, there would be more tribute albums to Vaughan, this time from the next generation of vocalists, those who had grown up listening to Vaughan. They loved her voice and what she did with it, and they learned from her example. Dianne Reeves released The Calling: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan in 2001. Reeves began listening to Vaughan as a high schooler in the 1970s, when her uncle gave her a copy of Sarah Vaughan, and she credits this album with helping her define her voice and use it as an instrument, all while inspiring her to take herself seriously as a musician. Reeves had only one conversation with Vaughan, backstage at a Cannonball Adderley tribute concert in 1975, and Reeves, then only eighteen, didn’t realize that she had been speaking with her idol. Three years later, she opened for Vaughan at a festival in Wichita, Kansas. She was now twenty-one and working with trumpeter Clark Terry, who had told Vaughan about the promising young vocalist. “I remember being on stage and [I] looked out, she’s sitting out [there]—I could see something sparkling,” Reeves said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I started singing everything I knew and Clark started laughing, because I wanted to impress her. I finish, and she walks backstage, and she looks at me and she says, ‘As long as I live, I don’t ever want you opening for me again,’ and then walks off. I was in tears.”10
It was a crushing experience, but it was also an endorsement, a thumbs-up of sorts. Reeves possessed a range, technical facility, and mastery of her voice reminiscent of a much younger Vaughan, and the veteran singer was competitive. That night she schooled Reeves. “I just remember leaving without being able to speak to anybody of what I just heard,” Reeves explained. She was in awe of Vaughan’s breath control; the suppleness of her voice, how she would bend a note and then take it higher and higher; how she got inside of a song’s harmonies; the intimate conversation she had with the other musicians onstage; and, perhaps most important, the unwavering respect that those same musicians had for Vaughan.11
“She was always reaching. That was important to me,” said Reeves. “She always had a conversation, musically, with the musicians. She wasn’t afraid to work with anybody, because for her every musician has their harmonic vocabulary, their approach. Because of that, I love working with different people, because it’s like, ‘Oh, I didn’t hear it like that,’ and then you find yourself in this new place and you start creating in this other way and you’re hearing their stuff in a totally different way, and you’re going, ‘Well, I didn’t hear it like that.’ Just keeps going on and on. This fearlessness of being able to go into all of these different kinds of ways of thinking about music, to me, was probably the greatest inspiration.”12
There were other, more practical lessons too. Reeves learned that she should sit while singing ballads. “She let me know that your voice doesn’t have to get old,” said Reeves, who heard Vaughan perform when she was in her fifties and sixties, and, miraculously, her voice seemed to improve with age. And by observing Vaughan and her contemporaries, Reeves came to understand her priorities as a musician and the kind of career she wanted to have. “When I did my first record contract, I asked for artistic freedom from the very beginning,” explained Reeves. This was in 1981, a year before Vaughan recorded Gershwin Live! and only four years after she organized the sessions for I Love Brazil!—albums where Vaughan finally had the artistic control and freedom that she had fought for her entire career. Reeves had seen record producers try to water down talent, including Vaughan’s, stripping it of its richness and power, its complexity, and agency so that it would fit into the little space where they needed it to be. “That is just not cool,” Reeves remembered thinking, and she became determined not to let this happen to her.13
“What [Vaughan] was and what she did was outrageously powerful, and she was a woman,” said Reeves. Vaughan seized her power. She was true to herself in a world that didn’t always want her to be, paving the way for future generations of vocalists to do the same. “There was a point in my life—I love her so much—that I realized even when I started singing as Dianne Reeves, the person, and Dianne Reeves, the singer and the person . . . ,” Reeves explained, then paused. “[Singing] is the one thing that nobody could take away. This was the ship. I’ll stand in it. This is my power, is my superhero suit, and you can’t take that away from me.”14
When I was three years old, I was scat singing to Sarah Vaughan and Ella albums,” said Ann Hampton Callaway, remembering her family’s love of jazz as she grew up in Chicago in the 1960s. Callaway, who released From Sassy to Divine: The Sarah Vaughan Project in 2014, also considers Vaughan a role model. Like Vaughan, Callaway plays piano, and Vaughan helped her understand that “you don’t have to be the chick singer; you really know what you’re talking about, you know what key you sing a song and you know the changes, you know a lot more musically.” She admired the emotional intensity and sensuality of Vaughan’s singing and how she brought disparate musical elements together into a single musician. “One of the things that I was very captivated by was the sound of her voice. I loved classical music, and I loved pop music, and I loved jazz music. She seemed to combine all of those. She had almost an operatic approach sometimes, and her voice had all the colors. I’d like to say that her voice was very orchestral. She had many colors in her voice and could bring out the cellos for one song, flutes for another, and the trumpets for another,” said Callaway, adding, “She gave me a palette. She gave me the sense of the voice as not just one sound. That it is a . . . there are so many different colors to the human voice that you can use to express feeling and story.”15
Callaway also learned from Vaughan’s live albums. She loved when Vaughan made mistakes and fixed them on the spot, like she did when she stumbled over the word “Parthenon” on Sarah Vaughan After Hours at the London House or her impromptu tribute to Ella Fitzgerald when she forgot the lyrics to “How High the Moon” from Sarah Vaughan at Mr. Kelly’s. “There was a sense that you can make a mistake as a singer and it’s okay,” said Callaway. “That you can just make fun of yourself. You can be funny and make up new lyrics in the moment, and as long as you know how to do that, you never ever have to have stage fright.” Vaughan showed her how to believe in herself, how to trust her musical toolbox, and the value of living in the moment. “One of the greatest freedoms in my career is that I am never worried about—I mean, I am always going to do my best and sing a song and honor the song, but if I screw up, I make up new lyrics just like Sarah.”16
“I think subliminally I picked up when I was studying her . . . that she has [a] star quality she owned,” continued Callaway. “There are the two types of singers: owners and renters. Renters are like, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll do this, this seems like an interesting song.’ Then there are singers like, ‘This is how I feel. This is what I mean. This is what I have to say.’ She will get up to a microphone, and whatever she said, whatever mood she was in, however much sleep she had or little sleep she had, or how many cocktails she had, she got up to a microphone and would still be Sarah Vaughan.”17
And Vaughan has influenced the newest generation of singers, young women who never saw Vaughan perform live but continue to listen to and learn from her. “She was one of my mom’s favorite singers. So I don’t remember a time she wasn’t a part of my life and what I lived,” explained Cécile McLorin Salvant, a promising new star on the jazz scene with a voice that many liken to a young Sarah Vaughan’s. Born in 1989, only months before Vaughan passed away, she remembered hearing Vaughan’s voice as her mother cooked dinner and cleaned the house and as her family hung out on Sunday afternoons, listening to the same song over and over. She associates Vaughan with those sweet memories of her childhood. “And I think that’s definitely part of my love and attachment to her, is that element of—it feels like I’m going home.”
As a teenager, Salvant was interested in classical singing, but then she found herself drawn to Vaughan’s voice. “I was just in awe, and I wanted to sing just like her,” she said. “That’s what I wanted.” Like countless vocalists before her, she was fascinated by Vaughan’s vocal control, her vibrato, the endless spectrum of colors and timbres she created, her harmonic and rhythmic approach, and, of course, her virtuosity, how she could go anywhere with her voice. She was also intrigued by Vaughan’s ability to sound like a crooner. She could sing with the same power and force as a man. “I thought, ‘This is just the best voice.’ That just feels good to listen to.”18
Vaughan will continue to influence future generations of singers. In 2012, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Vaughan’s hometown of Newark launched the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. Each year, thousands of aspiring vocalists from around the world, all of them women, submit audition tapes and videos, hoping that they will get their big break, just like Vaughan did in 1942 when she stepped onto the stage of the Apollo Theater in Harlem. “It keeps the flame alive,” said John Schreiber, once a road manager for Vaughan and now the CEO of the performing arts center and the competition’s cofounder. “It’s important that young singers and young musicians understand her legacy, appreciate her contributions, and have opportunities to aspire to be great and unique. I think that’s what this does. [The] young women who participate, I’m terribly moved by each of them. They’re genuinely honored to be participating in a competition with Sarah’s name on it. They all understand who she is and [that] she’s on the pantheon.”19
And this cycle of influence and inspiration continues on a smaller scale too, in intimate neighborhood clubs when a vocalist decides to sing a set in tribute to Sarah Vaughan, or when a young woman posts a video of herself online singing “Whatever Lola Wants,” copying every detail of Vaughan’s cover, because she loved the way that Vaughan sang the tune and how singing like Vaughan makes her feel empowered, bold, and confident.
“Sarah Vaughan is quite simply the greatest vocal artist of our century,” proclaimed composer Gunther Schuller in 1980 as he introduced her to audiences at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “Her art is so remarkable, so unique that it, sui generis, is self-fulfilling and speaks best on its own musical artistic terms. It is—like the work of no other singer—self-justifying and needs neither my nor anyone else’s defense or approval.”20 And now, as the twenty-first century is well under way, Vaughan is still making her mark. Her legacy continues not just in the vocalists who honor her but also in her fans. Her legacy lives on in the listeners who cherish her albums, in their childhood memories of aunties and grandmothers playing Vaughan whenever they visited. In a young couple’s memories of falling in love. Or in a college student playing cribbage with her roommates. And as these memories fade, new ones are made as the next generation of listeners discovers Vaughan for the first time, buys her records, plays her at their wedding, or simply enjoys her voice on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Sarah Vaughan can be heard on the radio, in television commercials, and in the grocery store as we shop. Hers is a voice that has become a part of our sonic landscape, a part of our daily lives. It is a voice for the ages that forever changed the way we hear and appreciate the human voice in song.