Nancy Wilson 1937-2018

The world of popular standards has lost one of the last major vocalists to come along at the tail end of the "golden age" of American vocal pop, the mid 20th century. Nancy Wilson, who often referred to herself as a "song stylist", straddled many different genres over the course of her nearly 60-year career, including R&B (she won her first Grammy in 1965 for Best R&B Recording, with "How Glad I Am"), jazz (her last two Grammys came in 2005 and 2007 for Best Jazz Vocal Album), and even more contemporary forms of pop, funk and soul during the 1970s, '80s and '90s. Coming along just as American popular music was undergoing a drastic sea change in the 1960s, Wilson was something of a throwback to the singers who inspired her as a child, including Nat "King" Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Billy Eckstine.

Born February 20, 1937 in Chillicothe, Ohio, she was already steeped in the Great American Songbook by the time she was a teenager, and won a talent competition at the age of 15 that led to semi-regular television appearances and club tours before she had even graduated high school. Some advice from jazz legend Cannonball Adderley (with whom she would later collaborate on a titanic 1962 album), led to her relocating to New York City, then a hub of the recording world. By the age of 22, she had released her first album for Dot Records, entitled Like in Love. Soon, she would be signed to Capitol Records and releasing multiple albums per year throughout the 1960s, including The Swingin's Mutual (1961) with George Shearing; The Nancy Wilson Show (1965), a collection of recordings from her Emmy-winning variety show; and the timeless But Beautiful (1969).

With a voice that seemed a blend of Dinah Washington and Lena Horne, Wilson was a bit of an anomaly at a time when rock n' roll and Motown sounds were taking over the airwaves. She scored four top 10 albums during the 1960s, and had a huge single hit with "Tell Me the Truth", which led to an acclaimed engagement at the Coconut Grove. Nevertheless, after the 1960s, she struggled to keep the hits coming amidst the changing musical landscape. She tried her hand at some more contemporary genres, sometimes to the frustration of her older fans, including the 1978 album, Life, Love and Harmony. She remained a fixture in small clubs all over the world, and by the 1980s was recording her albums in Japan, where live in-studio recording--the preferred method for Wilson and many other jazz artists--had not yet been totally supplanted by the more compartmentalized and over-produced methods prevalent in the States during the rock era.

A fixture at jazz festivals throughout the 1990s and even into the 21st century, she was also the host of NPR's music series Jazz Profiles. She continued recording for smaller prestige jazz labels like MCG Jazz, releasing her final album, Turned to Blue, in 2006. Just five years later, she performed live for the last time, at Ohio University, not far from the place of her birth. She was hospitalized for lung complications in 2008, and had been battling a long illness when she passed away on Thursday, December 13, 2018 at the age of 81 at her home in Pioneertown, California. She leaves behind three children and five grandchildren. Her husband, the Reverend Wiley Burton, died in 2008 of renal cancer.

The inheritor of a proud tradition of interpreters of popular song which thrived throughout most of the 20th century, Nancy Wilson was an unforgettable performer and a link to a time when melody, lyrics and phrasing still mattered in mainstream American pop. She kept the torch burning well past the time that her kind of music had vanished from the charts. Her loss will be keenly felt, but we still have the music to remember her by.