Vocalist sounded like ‘honey at dusk’
Jazz, blues singer nominated for 4 Grammys
SEATTLE — Ernestine Anderson, the internationally celebrated jazz vocalist who earned four Grammy nominations during a six-decade career, has died. She was 87.
The King County Medical Examiner’s Office says it received a report that Anderson died of natural causes Thursday, March 10 at a nursing home in Shoreline, Wash.
The jazz and blues singer performed all over the world, from the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall to festivals in South America, Japan and Europe.
She toured widely and sang with bands led by Los Angeles R&B singer Johnny Otis and swing-band leader Lionel Hampton. She performed at the presidential inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953.
Childhood friend and producer Quincy Jones once described her voice as the sound of “honey at dusk.”
Anderson, who was born Nov. 11, 1928 in Houston to a construction worker and homemaker, began singing in church when she was three years old. She won a talent contest when she was 12 and sang at Houston’s Eldorado Ballroom once a week for about four months.
Her family moved to Seattle in 1944, where she attended Garfield High School and began singing with the Bumps Blackwell Junior Band, featuring Jones, saxophonist Buddy Catlett and others. She left home at 18 to hit the road with Otis’s band.
She recorded her first single K.C. Lover/Good Lovin’ Babe in 1948 and also married for the first time.
Over the decades, she moved between Los Angeles, New York and Europe, but often returned to Seattle.
While in New York, Anderson recorded with Jones, Russell Jacquet, tenor saxophonist Clifford (King) Solomon and others.
Frustrated with her slow career growth in New York, Anderson joined Swedish bandleader Rolf Ericson to tour Europe. While there, she recorded an album, Hot Cargo, that Mercury Records later released in 1958 to rave reviews.
Time magazine at the time called her “the best-kept jazz secret in the land.”