Minutes after I heard that Nancy Wilson was dead I went online to YouTube to see and hear again her glorious majesty, the wondrous beauty of her voice. Her signature song, “Guess Who I Saw Today,” popped up without any further search, and once again I was transported back as she recounted a song that she must have reprised hundreds of times.
Although her fans know the song’s ending, even so they never tire of her rendition, and there were times when she improvised on the lyrics or presented facial expressions and body movements to emphasize her surprise at being undone by her lover.
Some of the song was emitted in her smooth, mellow voice and part in recitative, but in both cases she was totally in control, and like so many of her performances she had the audience in the palm of her hands.
“Guess Who I Saw Today” might have been her most requested tune, but it was just one of many that made her a crowd favorite and a special vocalist for more than five decades, some 70 albums and numerous appearances on some stage or another. Often cited as a song stylist, a torch singer and a pop-jazz diva, she possessed portions of each designation, although she was probably best defined as a singing storyteller.
Wilson, on many occasions, said, “I never considered myself a jazz singer…I take a lyric and make it mine. I consider myself an interpreter of the lyric.”
And as an interpreter she made a repertoire of songs her own, winning three Grammys, recording a trove of chart-busting albums and making a slew of cameo appearances on television and in movies. That is but a portion of her illustrious career that now commands the press as her friends and relatives prepare for her home-going. Wilson, 81, died last Thursday, Dec. 13, at her home in Pioneertown, Calif., a town near Joshua Tree National Park. According to her manager and publicist Devra Hall, Wilson succumbed after a long illness.
She was born Feb. 20, 1937, in Chillicothe, Ohio, the eldest of six children. Her father worked in an iron foundry and her mother was a maid. A child prodigy who began singing in church, she had already chosen singing as her future profession at 4 years old. That dream began to take shape and become a reality by the time she was in high school in Columbus, Ohio. She was so good that she not only won a talent contest sponsored by a local television station, but also she was given her own show, “Skyline Melodies.”
After a few classes at Central State College, she began touring with Rusty Bryant’s Carolyn Club Big Band. It was during this stint that she met alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, who convinced her to move to New York City. She wasn’t in the city long before she was performing at The Blue Morocco in 1959 and later signed with Capitol Records. All the while she was holding down a full-time job as a secretary for the New York Institute of Technology. “Like In Love” was her debut album, featuring Billy May’s band and from which flowed such gems as “Fly Me to the Moon” and Billy Strayhorn’s “Passion Flower.”
As good as this date was—and she would do another with May—it was her stints with Ray Bryant and Adderley that marked her entry into the realm of jazz. Wilson contends that she wasn’t a jazz singer, but the Adderley brothers and their ensemble begged to differ, and after they put their formidable sound in back of her sweet sound the world would offer its opinion at the record stores. In 1962, she hit jazz pay dirt with Adderley as they shared top billing in the album’s title, and the highlight here was her version of “Save Your Love for Me.” Two years later, she really hit it big at Billboard with “(You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am.” It soared to No. 11 on the charts. From 1963 to 1971 she had a string of hits on Billboard’s Hot 100.
In the 1960s she began appearing on television, including her own show that copped an Emmy. There was not a notable television show in the ’60s and early ’70s on which Wilson was not summoned to appear. During the 1980s, she recorded five albums in Japan and was selected as the winner of the Tokyo Song Festivals.
When her honey-coated voice wasn’t wrapped around a song, it was extrapolating on the history of the music or interviewing guests on “Jazz Profiles” on NPR, something she would do as a host from 1996 to 2005. In 2001 she and the show garnered the George Foster Peabody Award and three years later the National Endowment for the Arts presented her with a Jazz Masters Fellowship for lifetime achievement.
Among her many concert dates, one that is practically matchless occurred in 2007 at Carnegie Hall. Her voice was absolutely peerless and perfect with her rendering of “Never, Never Will I Marry.” Of course, outside of song, she did marry, first to Kenny Dennis and then Wiley Burton, who died in 2008. She had three children, her son Kacy Dennis, and daughters, Samantha and Sheryl Burton. In accordance with Wilson’s wishes, there will be no funeral service, but a celebration of her life will be held most likely around her birthday in February.
Sept. 10, 2011, Wilson gave her last public performance at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. “I’m not going to be doing anymore, and what better place to end than where I started.” And what a remarkable and rewarding beginning and ending, although we are lucky to have her voice with us forever.