Another one bites the dust. American Jazz Singer Nancy Wilson dies

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America has lost great music icons in 2018, a few month’s after the death of the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, the country and the entire world is now mourning yet another music star.

It’s a sad day for the music fraternity in the United States as renowned American Jazz singer and recording artist Nancy Sue Wilson yesterday died at her house in Pioneertown, Calif at the age of 81.

According to her manager, Devra Hall Levy, the late Nancy Wilson died after a battle with a long illness.  Nancy Wilson will be remembered for her skilled and flexible approach to singing which, provided a key bridge between the sophisticated jazz-pop vocalists of the 1950s and the powerhouse pop-soul singers of the 1960s and ’70s.

 

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Ms. Wilson released more than 70 albums in a recording career that spanned almost 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.

In her long and celebrated career, Ms. 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. I love the vignette, the plays within the song,” she once said.

 

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Some of Ms. 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, Ms. Wilson could infuse even the saddest song with a sense of strength.

In 1968, her hit song, “Face It Girl, It’s Over,”  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.

For her lifelong work as an advocate of civil rights, Ms. Wilson received an award from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in 1993. Later in 2005, she was inducted into the International Civil Rights: Walk of Fame at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site.

 

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In 1967, Ms. 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 on Feb. 20, 1937, in Chillicothe, Ohio, the first of six children. From the age of 4, Ms. Wilson sang avidly, and by the time she was 10, she was the lead singer in the local choir without any formal training.

 

Were you a fan of any of Nancy Wilson’s music?

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