Acclaimed ‘song stylist’ defied musical boundaries
Nancy Wilson, an awardwinning singer whose beguiling expressiveness in jazz, R&B, gospel, soul and pop made her a crossover recording star for five decades, died Thursday at her home in Pioneertown, Calif. She was 81.
Her manager Devra Hall
Levy confirmed the death but did not know the specific cause.
Wilson resisted the label of “jazz singer” for much of her career, although jazz was the form to which she returned time and again and in which she had her greatest critical and popular success. She considered herself “a song stylist,” she once told The Washington Post. “That’s my essence,” she said, “to weave words, to be dramatic.”
She sought to meld the seemingly incongruous styles of her two greatest influences: the ethereal Jimmy Scott and the penetrating and sultry Dinah Washington. Wilson’s singing was at once regal and vulnerable, and she inspired two generations of singers, including Patti LaBelle, Anita Baker and Nnenna Freelon.
Jazz historian and critic Will Friedwald, in his volume “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers,” called Wilson a formidable presence in pop, jazz and blues — “the most important vocalist to come along after these three genres were codified and move freely among them.”
Whatever the genre, Wilson’s trademark remained her talent for achieving emotive crescendos — from sensuous whisper to soaring release — in a single track. She was a supple interpreter of composers as varied as George Gershwin (“Someone to Watch Over Me”), Marvin Gaye (“Come Get to This”), Van Morrison (“Moondance”) and George Michael (“Careless Whisper”).
Trained in church choirs, Wilson became a connoisseur of secular music in her teens and left college to pursue a lucrative nightclub-touring career. She vaulted to prominence in the early 1960s through jazz collaborations with pianist George Shearing and saxophonist
Julian “Cannonball” Adderley.
In a subsequent flurry of albums, Wilson excelled at jazzy torch songs — stories about melancholy women and oncefiery love affairs burned down to their final embers.
“Guess Who I Saw Today,” one of Wilson’s signature hits, told the story of a housewife who casually informs her husband that she saw him during his afternoon tryst. Her brassily rendered “Face It Girl, It’s
Over” was an anthem about maintaining pride and strength by ending an unrequited relationship before it gets worse.
Her 1964 release “(You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am,” an exhilaratingly optimistic ode to love with a swirling jazz-pop arrangement, proved a Top 20 Billboard hit and earned her a Grammy Award for best rhythm-and-blues recording.
For a period, she became one of Capitol Records’ biggestselling stars — second only to the Beatles. She also became one of the first black spokeswomen to appear in national radio and TV ads, pitching products including Thunderbird wine and Campbell’s Soup.
Willowy and photogenic, she hosted a self-titled NBC variety show in 1966 and became a regular on similar programs.
She appeared on 1960s TV shows such as “I Spy,” and two decades later played Denise Huxtable’s mother-in-law on “The Cosby Show.”
Nancy Sue Wilson was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, on Feb. 20, 1937, and she grew up in Columbus. She said the women in her life — her mother, stepmother and grandmother — were “rocks” who encouraged the vocal talent that she first displayed in the church choir.
“When I was 4 years old, I knew I had a voice,” she told the Chicago Tribune. “The voice was there and it was in my face.”
She received a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters award in 2004 and, from 1996 to 2005, hosted the National Public Radio program “Jazz Profiles.” She recorded two Grammy-winning celebrity-duet albums — “R.S.V.P. (Rare Songs, Very Personal)” in 2004 and “Turned to Blue” in 2006 — before winding down her career.