Betty Carter

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Betty Carter
Betty Carter performing
Background information
Birth name	Lillie Mae Jones
Born	May 16, 1929
Origin	Flint, Michigan
Died	September 26, 1998
Genre(s)	Vocal jazz
Years active	1948–1998
Label(s)	Bet-Car, Verve

Betty Carter (May 16, 1929 – September 26, 1998) was an American jazz singer who was renowned for her improvisational technique and idiosyncratic vocal style. Carter expanded the role of the vocalist in jazz, to a full, improvising member of the band. Although her voice was not as admired by the public as such vocalists as Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald, many consider her to have exercised mastery of the human voice previously unheard in jazz. Carmen McRae once claimed that "there's really only one jazz singer - only one: Betty Carter."^[1]

Carter was born Lillie Mae Jones in Flint, Michigan and grew up in Detroit, where her father led a church choir. She studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory. She won a talent contest and became a regular on the local club circuit, singing and playing piano. When she was sixteen, she sang with Charlie Parker, and she later performed with Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. She honed her scat singing ability while on tour with Lionel Hampton in the late 1940s. It was Hampton's wife Gladys who gave her the nickname "Betty Bebop," a nickname she detested. In the 1950s Carter made recordings with King Pleasure and the Ray Bryant Trio. Her first solo LP, Out There with Betty Carter, was released on the Peacock label in 1958.

Carter's career was eclipsed somewhat during the 1960s and 1970s, though a series of duets with Ray Charles in 1961, including the R&B-chart-topping "Baby, It's Cold Outside," brought her a measure of popular recognition. In 1963 she toured in Japan with Sonny Rollins. She recorded for various labels during this period, including ABC-Paramount, Atco and United Artists, but was rarely satisfied with the resulting product. An episode in which a record company A&R man tried to run off with a set of her master recordings led her to establish her own record label, Bet-Car, in 1970. Some of her most outstanding recordings were originally issued on Bet-Car, including the double album The Audience with Betty Carter (1980). In 1980 she was the subject of a documentary film by Michelle Parkerson, But Then, She's Betty Carter.

In the last decade of her life Carter finally began to receive wider acclaim and recognition. In 1987 she signed with Verve Records, who reissued most of her Bet-Car albums on CD for the first time and made them available to wider audiences. In 1988 she won a Grammy for her album Look What I Got! and sang in a guest appearance on The Cosby Show. In 1994 she performed at the White House and was a headliner at Verve's 50th anniversary celebration in Carnegie Hall. In 1997 she was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton. Carter remained active in jazz music until her death in September 1998 from pancreatic cancer.

Like Art Blakey, Carter became known for working with developing young players. Beginning in the 1970s, she recruited most of her sidemen from a younger generation of musicians. In 1993 she helped launch the Jazz Ahead program for young musicians at the Kennedy Center.

Carter was a composer and arranger as well as an interpreter of songs. Her composition "Open the Door" became her own signature song; she recorded it several times in different arrangements and often used to end her performances. Her 1964 recording of the song was featured in the soundtrack of the 1999 Academy Award-winning film American Beauty. She was also known for her clever (and often humorous) medleys of Tin Pan Alley standards, most famously her weaving together of "Body and Soul" and "Heart and Soul".