"They asked me how I knew My true love was true"

-- from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

She grew up in Newark, New Jersey, born in 1924, singing in the church choir where her mother also sang. In 1942 she took the train to Harlem on a Wednesday night and entered the amateur contest at the Apollo Theater, where the prize was ten dollars and a week of work. She won, and the win changed everything. Billy Eckstine heard her that night and recommended her to Earl Hines, who hired her as a second pianist and singer. A year later she was in Eckstine's band, a traveling school of bebop whose ranks included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and she absorbed the new music the way some people absorb a language: completely, and without an accent.

She took that education and turned it into a career that crossed every boundary jazz and pop had drawn. Her recordings from the forties and fifties, made with the bebop rhythm sections she had come up with, still sound ahead of their time: the melodies bent into new shapes, the time elastic, the emotion never lost in the technique. She moved between smoky clubs and the pop charts with equal ease, scoring hits through the fifties and sixties, and she never watered down her instrument to fit the format. In the later decades her voice deepened, gaining a richness that made the ballads even heavier, and she carried it into concert halls, appearing with the Boston Pops and the Cleveland Orchestra and proving that a jazz singer could command a full symphonic stage.

She grew up in Newark, New Jersey, born in 1924, singing in the church choir where her mother also sang. In 1942 she took the train to Harlem on a Wednesday night and entered the amateur contest at the Apollo Theater, where the prize was ten dollars and a week of work. She won, and the win changed everything. Billy Eckstine heard her that night and recommended her to Earl Hines, who hired her as a second pianist and singer. A year later she was in Eckstine's band, a traveling school of bebop whose ranks included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and she absorbed the new music the way some people absorb a language: completely, and without an accent.

She took that education and turned it into a career that crossed every boundary jazz and pop had drawn. Her recordings from the forties and fifties, made with the bebop rhythm sections she had come up with, still sound ahead of their time: the melodies bent into new shapes, the time elastic, the emotion never lost in the technique. She moved between smoky clubs and the pop charts with equal ease, scoring hits through the fifties and sixties, and she never watered down her instrument to fit the format. In the later decades her voice deepened, gaining a richness that made the ballads even heavier, and she carried it into concert halls, appearing with the Boston Pops and the Cleveland Orchestra and proving that a jazz singer could command a full symphonic stage.

She received a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters award in 1989, a year before her death, and the tributes that followed used the language people reserve for peaks that cannot be climbed. She had taken the voice, that most personal of instruments, and made it work like a section of horns. Every singer who has ever improvised a run that sounded like a saxophone, who has treated the voice as an instrument rather than a carrier of words, is walking through a door she opened. The Divine One made the impossible sound easy, and she made it sound like the most natural thing in the world.

Sources: Hotsupper research, Wikipedia, NEA Jazz Masters (arts.gov), NJPAC Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, Wikidata

Sarah Vaughan was profiled in the documentary, The Divine One, in 2006.