Jazz vocalist fashioned 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, Calif. 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 middle-of-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 best-known 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 she is the 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, Ala., 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.
“As an artist then, taking such a political stand came with professional risks,” she told the blog Jazz Wax in 2010. “But it had to be done.”
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. Her father introduced her to records by mainly male artists, like Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine and Jimmy Scott, when he sang with Lionel Hampton’s Big Band.
“Much of my phrasing is so similar to Jimmy Scott’s,” she told the Los Angeles Times.
From the age of 4, Wilson sang avidly, and by the time she was 10, she was the lead singer in the local choir. She had no formal training.
“It’s all natural,” she told Jazz Wax.
As a teenager, Wilson became entranced by the female singers she heard on a local jukebox, especially Dinah Washington, whose ear for irony, and keen sense of drama, affected her deeply.
“The general humor is a lot of Dinah,” the singer said of her style in an interview for the National Endowment for the Arts’ website in 2004.
As the inspiration for her presentation, she cited Lena Horne.
At 15, while she was 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 twice-weekly gig on its show “Skyline Melodies.”
She is survived by her three children, Kacy Dennis, Sheryl Burton and Samantha Burton; two sisters, Karen Davis and Brenda Vann; and five grandchildren.
Wilson remained proud of her holistic approach to music, preferring to call herself a “song stylist” rather than a follower of any genre.
“I don’t put labels on it, I just sing,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s all in the ear of the listener. Let them decide.”