Nancy King was just 14 years old when she decided she would become the next Ella Fitzgerald.
The world-famous jazz singer was performing in 1954 at the University of Oregon alongside the equally celebrated trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong. Ms. King, already a jazz fan thanks to her musician parents, was seated front row center.
“I got as close to her as I could be and I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, that’s what I want to do,’” she told the Canadian newspaper The Vancouver Province in 2007.
Several years later, having left the University of Oregon after a year, she was working on her family’s farm when a call came in from San Francisco. A college friend had married a jazz musician and was telling him about Ms. King.
“I told him that you sing bebop, and he doesn’t believe anybody that milks two cows in the morning and rides horses and yodels out there on the south 40 can sing any bebop, and he wants to hear this,” Ms. King recalled her friend telling her, in an interview with NPR in 1992.
Ms. King was soon living in the Bay Area and singing regularly at San Francisco clubs. And over the next 60 years, during which she returned to Oregon, she became one of the country’s most admired female jazz vocalists — even though, by her own choice, she remained largely unknown to casual listeners.
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The post Nancy King, Jazz Singer Who Flew Under the Radar, Dies at 85 appeared first on New York Times.
