Abbey Lincoln and Me…

I met her when I was about twenty-three in Honolulu and she came to the bar where I was working. It was probably to get away from where she was working because the place was jammed with people. Anyway, she came to see me a couple of times and I'd run to catch her and I saw her magic on the stage. This beautiful woman would stand perfectly still with her hands like she was a doll, and her eyes would slide from one side of the room to the other. And the room was perfectly still, and I fell further in love with her... Billie Holiday was always honest. She didn't bend a note to make her voice sound good. It was in conversation that she sang and she was sincere and honest, and she never made a record for the money. And to me, she's the greatest singer of her era.
Abbey Lincoln meeting Billie Holiday
I started writing songs and I found songs that would express what was in my heart. Because, you know, Billie Holiday was like this, she didn't sing inane things. She sang about the life that she lived. She may have been masochistic and all these things, but she sang "Strange Fruit" and "God Bless The Child." It's the same reason they remember Bessie Smith because these were social singers. They weren't just - it wasn't self-aggrandizement - standing in front of people saying how great I am, but they were singing songs about people's lives.
Abbey Lincoln

t's the way of the music. Thelonious Monk would be drenched in perspiration and absolutely possessed. Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, even though I didn't see him, but I hear it in his music, it's the possession. It's the muse. They talk about the muse, I'm possessed of a muse, and I belong to her and she belongs to me. And as long as I sing and I am real and I do nothing to betray this trust, this is what I do. And it's a wonderful experience to come to the stage and to know that everything is alright.
Abbey Lincoln
The men don't do badly, Sidney Poitier, Billy Dee Williams, Denzel Washington, they team up with white actors and do shoot 'em ups and everything. It's the black woman who's at the bottom of the barrel here. Nobody is interested in producing her. She's expendable somehow. It's too bad because it would increase the black man's holdings if he would remember who he was and where he got all his stuff. He should be trying to do some things with a woman and tell something about the world we live in. But that's not the way it is. I watched Dorothy Dandridge die waiting for a movie. I watched Cicely Tyson struggle to maintain a standard as an actress. So I didn't go that way because I don't care. Really, I don't. I never dreamed of being in a movie. I never dreamed of any of this, so all this is a bonus. I just do what I want to do. I may not do everything I want to do, but what I do do, I want to do. And if nobody is around, I can paint and maintain that same spirit that gives me a feeling of security and increases my understanding of what and who I am. Because that's what the arts are for: to help us understand better what the human being is. For me, it's a holy experience, an experience that makes me whole.
Abbey Lincoln reflecting on leaving Hollywood

***It’s Magic (1959) signed by Abbey, Benny Golson***

Abbey Lincoln lived a remarkable life. She was the rare jazz singer who wrote her own lyrics and compositions, and also sang standards. She appeared with the great Max Roach (her husband from 1962-1970) on the civil rights classic We Insist! Freedom Now Suite in 1960, and she graced the silver screen in The Girl Can’t Help It opposite Jayne Mansfield (wearing the same red dress that Marilyn Monroe immortalized in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes three years earlier!) and For Love Of Ivy with Sidney Poitier. An incredible, uncompromising artist, this barely scratches the surface of Abbey's vast talents and contributions.

Born Anna Marie Wooldridge in Chicago in 1930, Abbey grew up on a farm in rural Michigan with eleven siblings. She recalled her early piano stylings, "There was an old piano in the house that my father furnished for us, and I was the only one, seemingly, who was interested in the piano. I found solace there and companionship, just sitting and picking out a melody on the piano, because it didn't get on my mother's nerves, thank goodness."

Abbey sang in the church choir and in local bands, and by the early 1950s, she departed to Los Angeles which led to a gig in Honolulu where she stayed for a year developing her craft. When she returned to Los Angeles, she met Bob Russell who became her agent and manager, and performed as Gaby Lee at the Moulin Rouge, an elegant supper club for swells and the LA cognoscenti. Russell, an accomplished lyricist who penned "Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me" and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" to Duke Ellington's incomparable melodies, suggested "Abbey Lincoln" as a new sobriquet: Abbey, a nod to Westminster Abbey, and Lincoln, a reference to Abraham Lincoln. As Abbey later disclosed , "He gave me the name because he knew I was concerned about my people."

Russell also introduced her, in her words, "to the svelte, chic world of the supper club.” Eventually, Abbey found the vamp role tiresome and limiting, "I never really felt it. You know, they talked about my being sexy and they talked - they said all these things - because I had a press agent... and they decided that was the image that they were going to put forth, of this wonderful looking woman who didn't have much talent though. I mean, she couldn't sing much. This is what I got...But in the process of all this, I learned to not trust myself because I wasn't studying to be truly an artist. By the time I met Roach, I had made the cover of Ebony magazine and I had made a movie with Jayne Mansfield called 'The Girl Can't Help It," and I had a career that I hadn't planned. But still, I was there. And so I left that and went with (Max) Roach. He told me that I didn't have to do things like that, and I believed him because I knew he was a great artist. I had a chance to watch him perform in California. I didn't know anything about Max Roach or Charlie Parker, because I wasn't approaching the music from that standpoint. I knew the people who were popular, who I'd hear on the radio, and I happened to like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee."

***We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (1960) signed by Abbey, Julian Priester, Max Roach***

Abbey was so much more than just a beautiful woman (which she was!) and her transformation from ingenue and femme fatale was by her own design and artistic choices, "I played that role... so, I radically went from there to this warrior woman and that befuddled everybody too. So when I discovered that there was the world of the artist, it saved my life because I could strive to be individual and as best as I could be. I didn't have to have money. I didn't have to have anything except my life, and I went for that and I'm glad I did."

With Max Roach’s encouragement, Abbey focused her considerable abilities as a jazz singer. This represented a sea change in her development as an artist and, eventually as a songwriter. For her second album,That's Him, released in 1957 on Riverside Records, Max enlisted his friends, an ensemble of bebop stars as her accompaniment - Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Sonny Rollins on tenor saxophone, Wynton Kelly on piano, and Paul Chambers on bass. The songs were mostly standards written by the Gershwins, Gordon Jenkins, Johnny Mercer, as well as a superb take on Billie Holiday’s sublime “Don’t Explain.” On Straight Ahead, her fifth album, Thelonious Monk contributed to the liner notes, "Thelonious was quoted as saying that I was not only a great singer and actress, but a great composer. I had never written a thing. I knew that he knew something that I didn't know, because Thelonious was not a flatterer, nor a liar. And it freed me up, so when I heard "People In Me," I used it. I mean, I believed it. It's like a child's song, and the compositions get better and better for me, I think."

With the impetus from Thelonious and her humble beginning writing one song - the simple blues "Let Up" on Abbey Is Blue - Abbey wrote hundreds of songs, even releasing Abbey Sings Abbey in 2007, a recording of twelve of her original compositions, a fitting capstone to her extraordinary career. Although her earlier music was critically acclaimed, even more so today, there was not a wide nor warm embrace in the early 1960s. As Abbey noted, “After I made Straight Ahead and Freedom Now Suite, I never got any offer from the Americans. They figured I was dangerous or something.” Not an uncommon refrain but, undaunted, Abbey soldiered on.

***Abbey Is Blue (1961) signed by Abbey, Julian Priester***

Along the way, she also received invaluable advice, "Thelonious Monk said to me after listening to the words I had written to his song 'Blue Monk,' he came to where I was and whispered in my ear, 'Don't be so perfect.' And I said to Max Roach, 'You know what Thelonious said to me? He said, don't be so perfect, What does he mean? And Roach said, 'He means make a mistake.' And I didn't know what either one of them were talking about... It means that you must reach for something, you have to reach for the sky. If you don't make it, at least you reached for it. So your voice cracked, but you reached for it. You don't play safe...you take a chance on making a mistake. That's what they meant, and I do. I've learned to sing like that." While Abbey did not share the vocal pyrotechnics or the technical facility of Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan - she did not scat - she was no less influential or amazing, and she never played it safe.

I was fortunate to see Abbey several times over the years in some intimate venues, including Blues Alley in Washington DC and Yoshi’s in Oakland, California. She always had young talent supporting her, mentoring and developing emerging artists like her great friend, fellow jazz singer extraordinaire Betty Carter. In performance, Abbey sang an engaging mix of standards, original songs and interesting covers like a reimagined “Mr. Tambourine Man” from the songbook of Bob Dylan. She was gracious when she signed her albums. When I handed her That’s Him, I mentioned that I loved her version of “Don’t Explain,” “Oh yes, thank you. That’s a beautiful Billie (Holiday) song, I love her.” She seemed, though, more interested in looking forward, rather than reminiscing about her past. I thanked her again for her time and, especially, her artistry.

Max Roach said shortly before his death in 2007, "I cannot say that Abbey sounds like Billie Holiday, but she is original like Billie Holiday. Abbey deals with the real world. Singers like Abbey, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith... go beyond being jazz singers because they are storytellers." A gifted artist, composer, lyricist and storyteller, Abbey Lincoln never sang anything inane nor ever played it safe. Her amazing legacy endures.