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This vocalist and performer enjoyed a long and rich career, and might be the only American singer who can boast to have been backed up by both the Count Basie Orchestra and the Munchkins. She mastered what is sometimes the hardest challenge for a performer, how to grow old gracefully. She spoke in interviews of having performed at the age of seven, although not a great deal of information is available on her background. Talent scout and record producer John Hammond picked up on her in 1939, when she would have been in her last year as a teenager. Youthful as she still was, she was already performing and recording with classic jazz tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, with whom she would be closely associated. Work with several of Hammond's prize clients, Count Basie and Teddy Wilson, was soon to follow, and she began working regularly in both concert settings and on a series of popular 78 records, among them her recordings of "Can't Help Lovin' That Man" and "American Lullaby." Another o...