This post features the Sarah Vaughan stamp from the Music Icon Series. The stamp is the most recent from the United States Postal Service to feature an important jazz musician. In fact, there have been a significant number of jazz artists on stamps. The first was Duke Ellington in 1986. More significantly, were the more than a dozen stamps featuring jazz musicians in the Legends of American Series from the 1990s. Yet, few of these stamps feature women. However, this post features one of the most important female jazz singers of all time, the fantastic Sarah Vaughan.
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Lois Vaughan was born on March 27, 1924 in Newark, New Jersey. Her father was a carpenter and her mother a laundress, but both were also amateur musicians. The very religious couple took their daughter to Mount Zion Baptist Church. As a young child, Sarah took piano lessons and sang in the church choir. As her musical skills grew, she fell in love with popular music and began to play it. By the time she was a teenager, she was sneaking into night clubs and performing as both a singer and a piano player.
In 1942, Vaughan won a competition at the Apollo Theater in New York City. As a result, she was given a week’s engagement and the famous theater. In November of that year, she was the opening act for Ella Fitzgerald in the same hall. Due to these early successes, Earl Hines hired her to join his band. The Hines band was full of virtuosic musicians, including many of the early creators of bebop such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. By late 1945, Sarah Vaughan began a career as a solo artist.
Solo Career
Following a late 1944 recording session with Continental in which she was backed by a septet featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Vaughan began freelancing by singing in clubs on 52nd Street in New York City. Within a year, she began recording for the Musicraft label. At that label, she recorded such songs as “If You Could See Me Now,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” and “Body and Soul.” In 1947, she was the first artist to record the jazz standard “Tenderly,” which became one of her first hits. Following this, she had success with the songs “It’s Magic,” and “Nature Boy.”
The success of these singles attracted the attention of the much larger Columbia label. She was able to switch labels in 1949 and she soon had a hit song on the new label with the song “Black Coffee.” At Columbia, she was able to record popular songs that pushed her into true stardom. These include songs such as “That Lucky Old Sun,” “Thinking of You,” “Vanity,” and many more. The success of these songs led to radio and television appearances and national and international tours.
Then, in 1954, Vaughan changed labels again, moving to Mercury. She had further hits with the new label, among them “Whatever Lola Wants,” “The Banana Boat Song, ” and “Misty.” The peak of her commercial success was in 1959 when her recording “Broken Hearted Melody,” became a gold record. Her success kept her on the road for tours, but she began to gravitate away from the commercial pop songs and towards more pure jazz in the 1960s.
More Popular Music
After several career mishaps and two difficult marriages, by the mid-1960s, Vaughan was in debt. This was at a time of diminishing career opportunities for jazz musicians. Her recordings slowed down and in the 1970s, she put out another popular album, A Time In My Life, featuring songs by Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Marvin Gaye. More pop songs followed including a cover of the Carpenter’s “Rainy Days and Mondays,” and even of the song “Send in the Clowns.” She was able to find success in her later career singing popular music and Broadway songs. In 1982, she won an Emmy for a program of Gershwin songs with the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic broadcast on PBS. She continued to perform until 1989, when she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She died in 1990.
The Sarah Vaughan Stamp
United States, 2016
Scott Number US 5059
In 2016, the United States Postal Service issued the Sarah Vaughan stamp as one of seven in the Music Icons series of Forever stamps. The design of the Vaughan stamp is by Ethel Kessler, featuring an oil painting by Bart Forbes, based on a 1955 photograph by Hugh Bell.
The Sarah Vaughan stamp was issued on March 29, 2016 (two days after what would have been her 92nd birthday), in her hometown of Newark, New Jersey. Ashton Potter made twenty-five million copies of the stamp.
Make sure to listen to Sarah Vaughan’s recordings. Here is one of my favorites:
