Sarah Vaughan was my crossover moment. As a classical pianist and violist, then aspiring music historian, I never listened to jazz (or much popular music, either) until I discovered Sarah in 1994, thanks to a college roommate. We listened to her often, as we chatted, played cribbage, cooked, and cleaned our apartment, and while I don’t remember the rules of cribbage, I do remember my first impressions of Vaughan’s voice. Like so many before me, I was drawn to its sheer beauty. Her tone was exquisite, full and rich like velvet or oozing honey, yet agile and supple, almost light as air. The classical musician in me appreciated her impeccable pitch and time as she tossed off one virtuosic passage after another. And she was a true contralto, able to jump, glide, and swoop between notes at the top and bottom of her four-octave range, all with a stunning precision and ease. But she was more than an amazing voice. I was equally captivated by her musical mind. How she took a song apart, then put it back together again, adding her own unusual harmonies, dissonances, and embellishments. She was always improvising, flirting with the spontaneous and unexpected, and as a classical musician beholden to the score, I was intrigued by this too.
But most of all, I admired the sheer force of her presence. She could silence a boisterous crowd by simply beginning to sing. If she forgot a lyric, she’d thrill her audience as she ad-libbed a new one, using it as a launching pad for new flights of fancy. If she stumbled over a speaker, she kept on singing, unfazed. She always remained in control—of her voice, her ensemble, and her audience. When I listened to Vaughan, I heard excellence, a true mastery of her craft. I heard a strong, confident, and independent woman. As a young woman just beginning to find my way in the world, I valued these qualities. I wanted to be that kind of woman. Although decades separated us, not to mention differences in race and class, I identified with Vaughan and the power of her voice. The more I listened, the closer I felt to her. I felt as if she were singing directly to me, expressing with her voice my hopes, dreams, and disappointments. She possessed an uncanny ability to tap into universal human experiences and create intimacy in her performances—the impression that there was an emotional connection, a real bond, between her and her audience.
So I continued to listen. I added Sarah’s jazz sisters—Ella, Billie, Anita, Peggy, and Nina—to my playlist, discovering the unique power and brilliance of their voices. Then I turned to the jazz instrumentalists: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, and on and on. My musical horizons expanded. Gone were the rigid highbrow/lowbrow values instilled by my German immigrant grandmother that privileged classical music above all else. I crossed over, embracing not only jazz but rhythm and blues, gospel, world music, and even cheesy pop tunes from the 1950s, which I not so secretly adore. As I transformed myself into a jazz and pop music historian, I stretched myself intellectually, exploring the fields of gender, race, and cultural studies that this new direction involved. It all began with Sarah Vaughan. Her singing was a passport of sorts that opened up my world.
Time and again, Vaughan fans have told me that she was also their entry point into jazz. And as I’ve studied Vaughan, coming to understand the scope of her talent and legacy, it has become clear that over the course of her forty-seven-year career, she brought countless listeners to the world of jazz. Her singing changed the outlooks of musicians, critics, disc jockeys, and run-of-the-mill fans. When she first burst onto the scene in the 1940s, she left her fellow musicians, especially vocalists, gasping in amazement at her daring innovations and vocal dexterity. It had not occurred to them that the human voice could be used this way. In the 1950s, as she found success as a pop artist crooning ballads, many white Americans heard her for the first time. They were intrigued and explored her jazz singing. Decades later, when she began performing with symphony orchestras, she introduced another new audience, this time classical music lovers, to the wonders of her voice and jazz. She was their crossover moment too.
Sarah Vaughan was a jazz singer par excellence. During her lifetime, she epitomized everything that jazz singing stood for, and in the decades since her death in 1990, she has often been mentioned alongside Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday as one of the best jazz singers of all time. Vaughan would have been flattered by the praise and happy that her legacy endured, but she would have been dissatisfied with its specificity. As she evolved as a musician, she increasingly rejected the label “jazz singer.” She found it too confining, too narrow a description of what she did and how she thought about music.
“I’m not a jazz singer. I’m a singer,” she insisted during an interview with the jazz publication Down Beat in 1982, reiterating a stance she first took in 1960. “I don’t know why people call me a jazz singer, though I guess people associate me with jazz because I was raised in it, from way back. I’m not putting jazz down, but I’m not a jazz singer. Betty Bebop [Carter] is a jazz singer because that’s all she does. I’ve even been called a blues singer. I’ve recorded all kinds of music, but [to them] I’m either a jazz singer or a blues singer.” She definitely did not consider herself a blues singer, though she often infused her singing with the blues. “What I want to do, music-wise,” she concluded, “is all kinds of music that I like, and I like all kinds of music.”1
Vaughan did not want to be categorized, pigeonholed, or contained, as a musician or as a woman. “Music has too many labels,” she told critic Max Jones in 1981, revisiting a familiar theme. “I call it all just music. . . . And I hate being labelled.”2 This rejection of labels, paired with her faith in music, defined her worldview. As a young black girl growing up in segregated Newark and then as a black woman traveling an often intolerant world, Vaughan understood the power of labels and stereotypes. She understood their ability to strip her of her individuality and humanity, to define and limit her, and, ultimately, to dictate how she should sing. Because musical labels describing genres and styles are often linked, in the public’s imagination, to the racial identity of the performer, she realized that these labels influenced how an audience would interpret and perceive her singing. Vaughan and her contemporaries also understood that labels reflected the larger power dynamics of society as a whole. As music historian Guthrie Ramsey Jr. plainly explains, the act of categorizing “tells us who’s in charge and running the show.”3 And Sarah Vaughan always wanted to run her own show. She wanted to sing her own way, constantly pushing back against the record executives, concert promoters, and club owners who tried to change her. She spent her entire career defying expectations, forging her own path so that her creative vision and voice could be heard. Vaughan didn’t want to be known exclusively as a jazz singer, or a blues, gospel, pop, or even opera singer, either, though she had the versatility and talent to fit into any of these niches. Nor did she want to be known simply as an exceptional black singer. She wanted to be an extraordinary singer. That’s it.
Given Vaughan’s dislike of labels, it’s safe to say that she would have also disapproved of the title of this biography: Queen of Bebop. While she was proud of her contributions to the style of jazz known as bebop and considered bebop “good music,” she likely would have felt that this title emphasized only one facet, just a few years, of her incredibly varied, almost half-century-long career. Yet Vaughan’s early years immersed in bebop informed the rest of her career; they shaped her worldview and her approach to music making. And in the seventy-five years since Vaughan first collaborated with her fellow beboppers in the 1940s, the development of this style has emerged as a pivotal moment in jazz history. Unlike the hummable tunes and danceable rhythms of its predecessor, swing, America’s popular music during the war years, bebop was characterized by an expanded, often dissonant harmonic palette, a more complex rhythmic language, wickedly fast instrumental lines, and brash virtuosity. In short, bebop was not for dancing, it was for listening to. It was art. Those wildly adventurous and innovative bebop musicians began to imagine jazz’s language for musical abstraction. And, indeed, bebop changed the status of jazz in the cultural imagination, transforming it from a popular or vernacular music into high art.4
Jazz historians have extensively chronicled the lives and accomplishments of bebop’s founding fathers: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and others. The attention is merited. They were all giants, the brilliant kings and princes of bebop. But Sarah Vaughan was a giant too. She was bebop’s queen. She was one of the only women working in the trenches in the early days and the first vocalist to introduce bebop singing to the world. (Ella Fitzgerald, who came of age during the swing era, also incorporated bebop aesthetics into her singing, but this would happen later.) Vaughan, in fact, became popular before her instrumental counterparts and played an important role in introducing them to a wider audience. Yet Vaughan’s role and contributions to bebop have often been overlooked. And her genius, unlike that of her male colleagues, remains undervalued and underexamined. Queen of Bebop seeks to remedy this.
Vaughan, however, was much more than the queen of bebop, or a jazz singer. She played the piano and organ. She sang spirituals and gospel music. She became a pop star in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, she dabbled in yet more pop, soul, funk, disco, and sometimes even rock ’n’ roll on her records, although she often disliked the results. She became a master of Brazilian music in the 1970s and 1980s, and she always channeled her inner diva and flirted with her operatic side. Vaughan embraced her self-appointed status as a singer free of labels, slipping between one genre, then another, and back again, all in an effort to create a vocal style uniquely her own. Her way of singing had never been heard before. And she was constantly striving to try new things and reach new audiences. As a result, she had countless crossover moments. Queen of Bebop focuses on three. Part I traces her journey from a church girl in Newark to a bebop innovator on the cusp of national fame. Part II explores her emergence as a pop star and how she balanced this new fame and fortune, not to mention the pressures of record executives, with her desire to remain an important, innovative voice in jazz. And part III reveals how she survived the takeover of popular music by rock ’n’ roll, remained true to herself, and launched a new phase of her career as a symphonic diva, singing jazz in venues previously reserved for classical music and opera.
Using crossover as a lens through which to examine Vaughan’s life in music honors her flexibility as a performer and the breadth of her career. It provides an opportunity to discuss jazz’s decades-long quest for legitimacy, its journey from lowbrow vernacular music to highbrow art music, and Vaughan’s role in the process, while also acknowledging her pop music, which, until now, has been largely ignored. With her pop singing, Vaughan helped desegregate postwar American airwaves and set the stage for the civil rights activism of the next decades. She challenged contemporary conceptions of race and gender and changed how white Americans understood and responded to black women in song. This approach also offers insights into her private life—how she struggled to balance her status as a professional woman, artist, and genius thriving in the male-dominated world of jazz with society’s expectations of her as a daughter, wife, and mother, and how the tensions between these two poles influenced not only her career but also her personal life. Most important, however, a focus on crossover helps unravel the many myths and misunderstandings that still inform how Vaughan’s story is told. In their place, Queen of Bebop presents a rich, dynamic, and complex portrait of Sarah Vaughan, a woman who, time and again, insisted, “I sing. I just sing.”