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Legendary jazz songstress Abbey Lincoln passes away
by Jamie Anderson - August 15, 2010 - comments
Famed jazz singer Abbey Lincoln died Saturday at age 80.
Abbey Lincoln, jazz singer, songwriter and actress, who evolved from 'a sexy thing in a Marilyn Monroe dress' to a tough voice for the civil rights movement, breathed her last Saturday at a nursing home in New York.
Lincoln’s niece, Evelyn Mason, broke the news of the death but did not divulge the cause of the demise.
The highly acclaimed icon, aged 80, had been in failing health ever since her open-heart surgery in 2007.
The glittering career
Born Anna Marie Wooldridge in Chicago on Aug. 6, 1930, she grew up in rural Michigan.
"She was gifted in so many ways. She was quite productive, and it was quite rewarding for those of us who heard her sing and watched her act,” said actor Sidney Poitier.
Lincoln was attracted to music from since she was a little girl. As a teenager, she moved to Los Angeles and modeled her early career after Lena Horne.
Lincoln shot to fame in the late 1950s as a sex-kitten supper-club singer. She became a noted film actress in the 1960s, but then stepped away from the big screen during the 1970s, only to stage an incredible return in the 1990s, not only as a different singer, but also as a spiritual elder.
"I don't scream anymore," she said on her return. "I sing about my life."
"There was a passion to what she did," said jazz critic Don Heckman, who averred that Lincoln's songwriting abilities made her a unique jazz singer.
"She was gifted in so many ways. She was quite productive, and it was quite rewarding for those of us who heard her sing and watched her act,” said actor Sidney Poitier.
"Certain people inside the African-American experience . . . act as griots, bearers of the culture," singer Cassandra Wilson said of the starlet.
"Paul Robeson was something like that. And so is she," Wilson said.
During the 2006 Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, Lincoln performed at the Kennedy Center. A year later she released her final album, 'Abbey Sings Abbey.'
Fought for civil rights
She married jazz drummer Max Roach and along with her husband made the then-radical recording 'We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite.'
Lincoln spent over a month getting psychiatric medication after her divorce from Roach in 1970. She never remarried.
She went on to make civil rights and racial pride unconcealed causes she fought for.
"She was not someone who was just singing a song. She had an agenda, and a lot of it had to do with civil rights.... She expressed herself in dramatic and impressive fashion in what she said and how she sang," said Heckman.