Sarah Vaughan's Birthday Is Today

The extraordinary jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990), known as "The Divine One," was born on this day. Vaughan, a native of Newark, New Jersey, where there is a street named for her, would have celebrated her 101st birthday.

The Divine Sarah

Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan by Elaine M. Hayes (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2017) is a true page-turner. One memorable scene is the one in which Sarah Vaughan and her bandmates were touring the South in the band's bus in, I think, the 1950s. A vehicle rode alongside the bus and one of its occupants started shooting at it. Everyone quickly ducked for cover. Miraculously no one was hit. One of the perils of being black Down South at that time.