Nancy Wilson, jazz singer who turned songs into stories
Nancy Wilson, whose skilled and flexible approach to singing provided a key bridge between the sophisticated jazz-pop vocalists of the 1950s and the powerhouse pop-soul singers of the 1960s and ’70s, died Thursday at her home in Pioneertown, California. She was 81.
Wilson’s death, which came after a long illness, was confirmed by her manager, Devra Hall Levy.
In her long and celebrated career, Wilson performed American standards, jazz ballads, Broadway show tunes, R&B torch songs and middleof-the-road pop pieces, all delivered with a heightened sense of a song’s narrative.
“I have a gift for telling stories, making them seem larger than life,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. “I love the vignette, the plays within the song.”
Some of Wilson’s bestknown recordings told tales of heartbreak, with attitude. A forerunner of the modern female empowerment singer, with the brassy inflections and biting inflections to fuel it, Wilson could infuse even the saddest song with a sense of strength.
In her canny signature piece from 1960, “Guess Who I Saw Today,” a woman baits her husband by dryly telling him a story in which he turns out to be the central villain. In her 1968 hit, “Face It Girl, It’s Over,” Wilson first seems to throw cold water in the face of a woman who fails to notice her lover has lost interest in her. Only later does she reveal that she is the benighted woman scorned. The latter number, an epic soul blowout, became one of the singer’s biggest chart scores, making the Top 30 of Billboard’s pop chart and Top 15 on its R&B list.
Her biggest hit came in 1964, when “(You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am,” a rapturous R&B ballad delivered with panache, reached No. 11 on Billboard’s pop chart. A hardworking and highly efficient singer, Wilson released more than 70 albums in a recording career that lasted five decades. She won three Grammy Awards, one for best rhythm and blues recording for the 1964 album “How Glad I Am,” and two for best jazz vocal album, in 2005 and 2007.
For her lifelong work as an advocate of civil rights, which included marching in the 1965 protest in Selma, Alabama, she received an award from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in 1993, and an NAACP Hall of Fame Image Award in 1998. In 2005, she was inducted into the International Civil Rights: Walk of Fame at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. In 1967, Wilson became one of the few African-Americans of the day to host a TV program, the Emmy-winning “Nancy Wilson Show” on NBC.
Nancy Wilson was born Feb. 20, 1937, in Chillicothe, Ohio, the first of six children born to Olden Wilson, a supervisor at an iron foundry, and Lilian Ryan, a maid.
At 15, while she was still a student at West High School in Columbus, Ohio, Wilson entered a talent contest held by the local television station WTVN, which led to a twiceweekly gig on its show “Skyline Melodies.” Until her graduation, she sang at nightclubs, sometimes with the 18-piece band Sir Raleigh Randolph and His Sultans of Swing.
Wilson spent one year at Central State College in Ohio before dropping out to pursue music full time. Still, she took care to hone her skills over a long period, touring continuously in the Midwest and Canada with Rusty Bryant’s Carolyn Club Big Band, with whom she cut her first recordings, for Dot Records.
She is survived by her three children, Kacy Dennis, Sheryl Burton and Samantha Burton; two sisters, Karen Davis and Brenda Vann; and five grandchildren.