Maxine Sullivan

Maxine Sullivan, born Marietta Williams on May 13, 1911, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, was an American jazz vocalist whose performing career spanned roughly five decades, from the mid-1930s until shortly before her death on April 7, 1987. Over that period she established herself as one of the foremost jazz singers of the 1930s, and her influence was acknowledged by later artists including Peggy Lee, who cited Sullivan as a key influence in multiple interviews.

Sullivan's entry into professional music came through her uncle's Pennsylvania band, The Red Hot Peppers, where she sang and also played the flugelhorn and valve trombone. Her wider career was set in motion in the mid-1930s when Gladys Mosier, then working with Ina Ray Hutton's big band, discovered her and made an introduction to pianist Claude Thornhill. Sullivan's first recordings followed in June 1937, and she soon became a featured vocalist at the Onyx Club in New York City. That same year, early sessions with bassist John Kirby produced a hit swing recording of the Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond," which became the defining record of her early career. The success of that recording directed her toward similar swing treatments of traditional folk material, with Thornhill arranging pieces such as "If I Had a Ribbon Bow" and "I Dream of Jeanie." Kirby became her second husband in 1938, the same year she made a brief appearance in the film Going Places alongside Louis Armstrong.

In 1940, Sullivan and Kirby became the first Black jazz artists to host their own weekly radio series, Flow Gently Sweet Rhythm, broadcast on CBS. Throughout the 1940s she performed with a range of ensembles, including Kirby's sextet and groups led by Teddy Wilson, Benny Carter, and Jimmie Lunceford, and she appeared regularly at New York venues including the Village Vanguard, the Blue Angel, the Ruban Bleu, and the Penthouse. In 1949 she appeared on the CBS television series Uptown Jubilee. Her Broadway career began in 1939 with the musical Swingin' the Dream, and she returned to the stage in 1953 in the play Take a Giant Step. The following year she appeared in Flight From Fear, a play about the numbers racket directed by Powell Lindsay.

In 1956, Sullivan recorded A Tribute to Andy Razaf for the Period label, an album featuring her interpretations of twelve songs written with Razaf's lyrics, with particular emphasis on compositions associated with Fats Waller, among them "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Honeysuckle Rose," and "Blue Turning Grey Over You." The recording session brought together a sextet that included trumpeter Charlie Shavers and clarinetist Buster Bailey. Two years later, in 1958, Sullivan was among the musicians photographed for the iconic image A Great Day in Harlem.

From 1958 Sullivan stepped away from performing to work as a nurse, returning to music in 1966 and appearing at jazz festivals alongside her fourth husband, stride pianist Cliff Jackson, whom she had married in 1950 and who died in 1970. A live recording from the 1966 Manassas Jazz Festival documents her return to performance. She continued to perform and record actively through the 1970s and into the 1980s, producing a substantial body of recordings during that final period of her career.

Sullivan's Broadway work culminated in 1979 with My Old Friends, for which she received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Her Broadway appearances thus stretched from 1939 to 1979, a span of four decades. Prior to her death she also participated in the film biography Maxine Sullivan: Love to Be in Love. Sullivan died in New York City on April 7, 1987, at the age of 75, following a seizure. She was posthumously inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1998.