Sarah Vaughan

The Full Biography

Sarah Vaughan. Singer. The Newark girl musicians called the Divine One, and friends called Sassy, who treated a standard like architecture.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is a woman at a microphone, head back, a note bending through more octaves than a pop song is supposed to need. The year might be 1954 in a studio with Clifford Brown, or 1974 and “Send in the Clowns.” What the still cannot show is Sarah Lois Vaughan of Newark, a church organist who won a Harlem amateur night on a dare, a bebop pianist who got hired to sing, and a woman who spent four decades refusing to be only one kind of voice.

She was born on March 27, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, to Asbury Vaughan, a carpenter who played guitar, and Ada Vaughan, a laundress who sang in the choir at Mount Zion Baptist Church. The first pressure was Sunday. She learned piano and organ in that sanctuary the way other children learned manners. The voice was already larger than the room. Newark in the Depression did not have a conservatory waiting for her. It had a church, a radio, and a dare.

The door was the Apollo Theater’s amateur night in 1942. She sang “Body and Soul.” She won. Within months she was opening for Ella Fitzgerald and sitting where a working band could hear her. Earl Hines hired her in 1943, first as a pianist and second singer, which is a fact the brochures compress. Billy Eckstine was in that orchestra. When Eckstine left to form his own band — the laboratory that held Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey — Vaughan went with him. She was not a guest. She was a musician in a band that was inventing the harmonic weather people would soon call bebop. She learned to hear a chord the way a horn hears it. She never unlearned it.

What came next was not a lucky streak. It was a catalog. “Tenderly” (1947) gave the pop audience a first official reason to know the name. “Nature Boy” (1948). “It’s Magic.” “Black Coffee” (1949), a torch song she made into a climate. She recorded for Musicraft, then Columbia, then, in the 1950s, for Mercury and its jazz line EmArcy. The EmArcy dates are the ones musicians still hand to students. Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown (1954) is a small-group record that treats her voice as a horn among horns. Brown died two years later. The record did not. It remains the cleanest argument that she was not a pop singer who visited jazz. She was a jazz musician who could also sell a single.

They called her Sassy because the talk was salty and the timing was a weapon. They called her the Divine One because the instrument did things other throats do not do: a velvet cellar, a soprano attic, a vibrato she could widen or close like a door, intonation so exact that horn players used her as a tuning fork. She could take a Broadway ballad and re-harmonize it in the air. She could take a novelty and refuse to wink. “Broken Hearted Melody” (1959) became her first gold record, a pop crossover she did not apologize for and did not let define the set that followed. “Misty,” the Erroll Garner song, is in her mouth a building with more floors than Garner drew. She could scat as a horn or refuse to scat at all; the refusal was a choice, not a limit. Live dates from the 1950s — Chicago, New York, the European rooms that had already learned her name — show a woman running a band from the microphone the way Hines had run one from the piano. She took the piano bench herself when a date needed it, a leftover from the Hines hire that she never treated as a trick.

She married George Treadwell, a trumpeter who became her manager, in 1946; he ran the career as a business and the marriage as a contract. That marriage ended. She married Clyde B. Atkins; during those years she adopted a daughter, Deborah, whom the world would know as Paris Vaughan. That marriage ended in ugly public weather. She married the trumpeter Waymon Reed. That marriage ended. The husbands are in the file because they managed, spent, or strained the work. The work is the plot. Friends from the road describe a woman who could be royal in a gown and then sit at a piano at 3 a.m. and run changes until the rhythm section begged. The nickname Sassy was earned in both rooms.

She did not stay inside the jazz club as a point of honor. She played the Copa. She played symphony sheds. She recorded Beatles tunes and Brazilian tunes and Sondheim. In a 1982 Down Beat interview she declined the cage.

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 … What I want to do, music-wise, is all kinds of music that I like, and I like all kinds of music.Sarah Vaughan, Down Beat, 1982

That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the Divine One brand is so useful to liner notes. The turn is the refusal to let a category smaller than her ear become the job. She had come out of Hines and Eckstine. She would not stay there as a museum. “Send in the Clowns,” which she began singing in the 1970s, became the late signature: a Sondheim ballad bent through that range until the familiar melody seemed newly carved. Gershwin Live! won her a Grammy in 1983. The National Endowment for the Arts named her a Jazz Master. She took the plaques and kept booking the next date.

The Columbia years, before Mercury, had already made her a jukebox name: “Tenderly,” “It’s Magic,” “Nature Boy” again in the pop weather. Mercury and EmArcy split the job on purpose — jazz dates for the musicians, singles for the racks. Swingin’ Easy. In the Land of Hi-Fi. No Count Sarah with Basie’s men. After Hours (1961), just voice and piano and guitar, is a small record that tells you what the gowns were built on. She recorded “Lullaby of Birdland” as if the club had been named for her. She recorded Brazilian songs before the bossa craze had a tourist map. She recorded Beatles tunes on Sarah Slightly Classical and on dates that jazz purists still argue about. The arguments were never her problem. The next date was.

Judy Garland, she told the Los Angeles Times in 1969, was the singer she had most wanted to sound like as a young woman — not to copy, but to get some of the soul and purity. The sentence surprises people who only know the bebop pedigree. It should not. She had always listened across the aisle. She recorded with Michel Legrand. She recorded with the Count Basie orchestra. She could open a concert with a standard the supper-club crowd knew and then take the second chorus into a place that crowd had not purchased. That was the generosity and the dare in the same bar.

The later years

The years after the Clowns became a signature were a long last mastery, not a fade. She sang with orchestras that could match the range. She sang in Japan, in Europe, in American rooms that had first heard her on Mercury. She was, on a good night in the 1980s, still the most complete vocal instrument jazz had produced, and she was still willing to be Sassy between tunes — a laugh, a side-eye, a story about a husband or a horn player that left a mark. Paris, the daughter, was in and out of a life that had never been built for quiet domestic weather. Vaughan kept the gowns and the piano and the refusal to become a greatest-hits kiosk.

Home in the last decade was California as much as New Jersey. Hidden Hills. She had smoked for years, a fact the voice had somehow outsung and then could not. Lung cancer was diagnosed. She kept dates as long as the body allowed. People who saw the late concerts talk about a narrowing of the lung and no narrowing of the ear. She could still land a pitch in the dark. She could still hold a room with a spoken aside. The NEA honor and the Grammys — including a Lifetime Achievement Award — sat in the house as receipts. She did not live long enough to become only a tribute. She died on April 3, 1990, in Hidden Hills. She was sixty-six. Newark buried her. The city that had given her a church organ claimed the body back.

The last records are not souvenirs. Gershwin Live! is a working date. The symphony collaborations are a woman still enlarging the job. She had come out of Mount Zion and the Apollo and a bandstand that held Parker, and she ended as a soloist who could stand in front of a hundred players and still sound like the most exact horn in the room. Friends from the last tours describe a professional who knew she was ill and did not make the illness the act. The act was the song. The talk, when the song ended, was still salty enough to keep the nickname honest.

In the 1980s she sang at the White House and at Carnegie and in Tokyo rooms that treated her as a visiting instrument of state. She made Crazy and Mixed Up (1982) and The Mystery of Man, dates that did not chase a format. She sat in with symphony pops programs that paid the bills and still let her take “Send in the Clowns” into a place Sondheim had not drawn on the page. The lung trouble arrived as a professional problem before it arrived as an obituary. She shortened tours. She did not shorten phrases. Newark, which had watched her leave, began the civic thank-yous while she could still hear them. She accepted what she could accept and kept the California house as a place to recover between flights. Paris was the daughter in the story; the records were the other children. She tended both as long as the breath allowed. When the breath stopped allowing, she stopped. There was no farewell tour announced as one. There was a last date, and then there was Hidden Hills, and then there was a funeral the church girl would have recognized.

She did not leave a large public scandal. She left a daughter, a Newark street memory, and a stack of EmArcy and Mercury sides that younger singers still use as a test. If you can live inside a Vaughan ballad without hurrying, you might be ready for a room. If you cannot, the record will tell you.

After she was gone

The Divine One industry did what industries do. It sold the nickname. The better rooms kept the Clifford Brown album, the Sondheim, and the Down Beat refusal. Newark named weather after her — a performing-arts hall, a corner, the kind of civic thank-you a city gives a girl who left and remained local. Paris Vaughan has had to share a mother with a century of singers who steal a vowel and hope nobody notices. Ella is in one sentence. Billie is in another. Sassy sits in a third and does not fit either.

She came out of a Newark church, won the Apollo on a dare, sat at Hines’s piano, rode Eckstine’s bebop bus, made EmArcy dates that still teach, sold a gold pop record without surrendering the set, sang Sondheim as if he had written for her range, and died in California with Newark waiting. If you only remember the nickname, you have the still. If you remember the organ, the dare, Clifford Brown, and a woman who would not be only a jazz singer, you have her.

Portrait: William P. Gottlieb · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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