In the wake of Nancy Wilson’s sad passing this past week at the age of 81, Dr. Guy discusses the iconic singer’s cultural importance, style, and sound. After a lifelong listening relationship culminating with the recent release of Bridget Ramsey’s “Save Your Love for Me” video, Wilson’s departure comes at a particularly bittersweet time for the Ramseys and the extended MusiQology family. Dr. Ramsey’s reflection, heartfelt and historically rich, tracks Wilson’s importance in his own life and in the broader sonic and cultural fabric of America.
I had to be three or four years old when I first heard Nancy Wilson sing.
She was in my parents’ record collection, Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley, recorded in New York and released in 1962. At the time, this was heard as the hip Up-South sound of revolution music: proud, stylistically promiscuous and soulful. It was movement music played through the March on Washington and the assassination of an American president. It defiantly demanded artistic and social respect. But it was cherished when times were good, too. Party music. The happy times.
When my parents were in their early thirties and raising a young black family on the edge of profound social change, Nancy was in the soundtrack. You could hear the hope, the fight, the fear, and the fire of that challenging personal and historical moment in her voice. Possessing one of the most marvelous vocal instruments of the twentieth century, Nancy’s buoyant art was first heard widely in a jazz context. She shunned that label, though, saying that her focus was not on genre but “song.” Nancy liked the word “stylist” to describe her work.
Style? She had plenty. And she came out the gate letting the world know that style was, for her, a matter of blending gift and calculation.
One of Nancy’s major influences, singer Dinah Washington, once joked with a slender girlfriend that “if I had my voice and your body, I’d be a bitch.” Jokes aside, Dinah knew that looks mattered in show business, and she was known for performing in glamorous evening gowns. Nancy, the protégé, took note of Dinah’s beauty ideals and maintained a standard of impeccable, exquisite taste throughout her five-decades-long career.
Since her passing, she’s become an instant Instagram sensation as mourning fans post hundreds of beautiful photographs and performance clips showcasing her superior sense of grace and style. Her supermodel stature, the impossible graceful line of her long neck, perfectly coiffed contemporary hairdos, tiny waist, and willowy arms gave her a coquettish charm even before she draped them all with stunning, timeless gowns. She emerged in the public eye while Motown launched its proud campaign to sanctify black women’s beauty as a matter-of-fact and not opinion. Indeed, black beauty became a sure commodity in the 1960s: Ask the Supremes. As someone who grew up in a house flooded with perfect Ebony Lady images among relatives and in black periodicals, I viewed Nancy as the epitome, the case-in-point. She was cover-girl fine.
Nancy also “heard” Dinah and other singers like little Jimmy Scott, who she also named as an influence. The craft she applied to a song involved a bundle of truly remarkable and widely influential vocal techniques that combined understatement and high drama. One of the qualities driving Nancy’s art was being blessed with a reedy timbre, a quality she shared with Dinah. The edges of this sound made her controlled vibrato, or lack thereof, a superpower. She knew exactly when to use an open vowel with zero vibrato until final release, and it sent chills through you.
Nancy also knew how handle her technology. It was astonishing to see her play with a mic’s distance from her face—sometimes moving it rapidly back and forth to create a panning effect. Although she didn’t deploy complex melodic gestures like some of her scatting counterparts, what she did with a phrase—her confidence in economy—made her sound accessible to audiences and respected among musicians.
For more on Bridget Ramsey’s “Save Your Love for Me,” read our coverage HERE and at WXPN’s The Key HERE.
Check her out on the Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley LP that made her famous. She’s sharing top billing with a virtuoso hard bop musician known for his jaw-dropping chops. And Cannonball doesn’t hide them here, playing glorious line after line of sinewy bebop on the instrumental tracks and around Nancy vocal lines. It would be easy to see this as an unfortunate foil to the singer’s understated craft. But it works beautifully, particularly on the signature tune “Happy Talk.” As Nancy sings with her signature impeccable intonation, well-positioned blues turns, perfect vibrato and the ingenious way she shades a vowel and closes consonants, it’s just as satisfying as all the technical virtuosity displayed by the instrumentalists. They could play a lot of notes because it was impossible to outshine her. Even the tasty phrases that respond to sung ones come across as intimate and careful, extending a tradition that Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith mastered in the 1920s.
Beyond shaping the musical tastes of my early musical life, Nancy’s work would inform my music later. As a young jazz pianist in Chicago, the singers I worked with would always sing songs from Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley. I had to transcribe the parts because they wanted the performances to sound just like the record. And recently, my daughter Bridget Ramsey Russell, a singer, has covered songs from that album. We’ve spent a lot of time through the years dissecting all the nuances of Nancy’s art from every angle. I think she counts her as a major influence. Indeed, Nancy looms large in my family across generations.
As a GRAMMY-winning singer, a prolific recording artist, a riveting live performer, a pioneering television and radio host show, and as one of the black entertainers who dared to march with Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement, Nancy Wilson’s value to American music culture is assured.
But it’s the personal connection to her artistry that I’ll remember. Nancy’s work will always remind me of the best things good music brings to the world—the beauty, the charisma, the challenges and, of course, the joy.
The happiness.
Oh, Nancy.
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