Nancy Wilson, Singer Who Bridged Jazz and Pop, Is Dead at 81
Nancy Wilson,
whose skilled and flexible approach to singing provided a key bridge
between the sophisticated jazz-pop vocalists of the 1950s and the
powerhouse pop-soul singers of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Thursday at
her home in Pioneertown, Calif. She was 81.
Her
death was confirmed by her manager, Devra Hall Levy, who said Ms.
Wilson had been ill for some time; she gave no other details.
In
a long and celebrated career, Ms. Wilson performed American standards,
jazz ballads, Broadway show tunes, R&B torch songs and
middle-of-the-road pop pieces, all delivered with a heightened sense of a
song’s narrative.
“I have a gift for
telling stories, making them seem larger than life,” she told The Los
Angeles Times in 1993. “I love the vignette, the plays within the song.”
Some of Ms. Wilson’s best-known
recordings told tales of heartbreak, with attitude. A forerunner of the
modern female empowerment singer, with the brassy inflections and biting
inflections to fuel it, Ms. Wilson could infuse even the saddest song
with a sense of strength.
In her canny signature piece from 1960, “Guess Who I Saw Today”
(written by Murray Grand and Elisse Boyd), a woman baits her husband by
dryly telling him a story in which he turns out to be the central
villain. In her 1968 hit, “Face It Girl, It’s Over”
(by Francis Stanton and Angelo Badale), Ms. Wilson first seems to throw
cold water in the face of a deluded woman who fails to notice that her
lover has lost interest in her. Only later does she reveal that she is
the benighted woman scorned.
