From Wikipedia (edited by me)
Joyce Bryant (born October 14, 1927) is an American
singer and actress who achieved fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a
theater and nightclub performer. With her signature silver hair and tight
mermaid dresses, she became an early African-American sex symbol, garnering
such nicknames as "The Bronze Blond Bombshell", "the black
Marilyn Monroe", "The Belter", and "The Voice You'll Always
Remember".
Bryant left the industry in 1955 at the height of her
popularity to devote herself to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. A decade
later, she returned to show business as a trained classical vocalist and later
became a vocal coach.
Joyce Bryant, the oldest of eight children, was born in
Oakland, California, and raised in San Francisco. Her maternal grandfather,
Frank Withers (né Frank Douglas Withers; 1880–1952), was an early jazz
trombonist. Bryant, a quiet child raised in a strict home, had ambitions of
becoming a sociology teacher
She eloped at the age of 14 but the marriage ended that
same evening. In 1946, while visiting cousins in Los Angeles, she agreed on a
dare to participate in an impromptu singalong at a local club. "After a
while," Bryant recounted in a 1955 Jet interview, "I found I was the
only one singing. A few minutes later the club owner offered me $25 to go up on
stage, and I took it because I [needed the money] to get home."
During the late 1940s, Bryant had slowly acquired a
series of regular gigs, from a $400-per-week engagement at New York's La
Martinique nightclub to a 118-show tour of the Catskill Mountains hotel
circuit.[4] Her reputation and profile eventually grew to the level that one
night, she appeared on the same bill as Josephine Baker. Not wanting to be
upstaged, Bryant colored her hair silver using radiator paint, and performed
wearing a tight silver dress and silver floor-length mink. Bryant recalled when
she arrived onstage, "I stopped everything!"Bryant's silver hair and
tight, backless, cleavage-revealing mermaid dresses became her trademark look
and, combined with her four octave voice, further elevated her status into one
of the major headlining stars of the early 1950s, by which time she became
known by such nicknames as "The Bronze Blond Bombshell", "the
black Marilyn Monroe", "The Belter", and "The Voice You'll
Always Remember.
Etta James noted
in her 2003 autobiography, Rage to Survive: The Etta James Story: "I
didn't want to look innocent. I wanted to look like Joyce Bryant. [...] I dug
her. I thought Joyce was gutsy and I copied her style–brazen and
independent."
Beginning in 1952, Bryant released a series of records
for Okeh, including "A Shoulder to Weep On", "After You've
Gone" and "Farewell to Love". Two of her most well-known
standards, "Love for Sale" and "Drunk with Love", were
banned from radio play for their provocative lyrics. Upon the release of
"Runnin' Wild" two years later, Jet noted that the song was Bryant's
"first to be passed by CBS and NBC radio censors, who banned three
previous recordings for being too sexy." Bryant remarked in 1980,
"what an irony that my biggest hit record was 'Love for Sale'. Banned in
Boston it was, and later...just about everywhere else."
Bryant, who often faced discrimination and was outspoken
on issues of racial inequality, became in 1952 the first black entertainer to
perform at a Miami Beach hotel, defying threats by the Ku Klux Klan who had
burned her in effigy.
She was critical of racial billing practices at night
clubs and hotels and advocated for entertainers as a group to fight Jim Crow
laws. In 1954, she became one of the first black singers to perform at the
Casino Royal in Washington, D.C., where she said that she had heard so much
about the segregation practiced there that she was surprised to see so many
African-Americans attend the downtown club. "It was a great thrill,"
she said, "to see them enter and be treated so courteously by the
management."
A Life magazine layout in 1953 depicted Bryant in
provocative poses, which film historian and author Donald Bogle said were
"the kind that readers seldom saw of white goddesses."
The following
year, Bryant–along with Lena Horne, Hilda Simms, Eartha Kitt, and Dorothy
Dandridge–was named in an issue of Ebony one of the five most beautiful black
women in the world.
Bryant earned up to $3500 a performance in the early
1950s, but she had grown weary of the industry. The silver paint had damaged
her hair, she didn't enjoy working on the Sabbath, and she felt uneasy with her
image. "Religion has always been a part of me," she said. "and
it was a very sinful thing I was doing – being very sexy, with tight, low cut
gowns."
She also recalled: "I had a very bad throat and I
was doing eight performances a day [...] A doctor was brought in to help and he
said, 'I can spray your throat with cocaine and that will fix the problem, but
you'll become addicted.' Then I overheard my manager say, 'I don't care what
you do, just make her sing!'" Further, Bryant hated the men, often gangsters,
who frequented the clubs in which she worked.
She was once
beaten in her dressing room after rejecting a man's advances. Her
disenchantment with the drug and gangster subcultures, combined with pressures
from her management, led Bryant to quit performing late in 1955.
Devoting herself to the Seventh-day Adventist Church,
Bryant enrolled in Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama. Ebony published a
feature article in its May 1956 issue entitled "The New World of Joyce
Bryant: Former Café Singer Gives Up $200,000-a-year Career to Learn to Serve
God".
Traveling for
years through the South, Bryant grew angry when she saw hospitals refuse care
for those in critical need because they were black.[11] As a result, she
organized fundraisers for blacks to buy food, clothing, and medicine, and she
continued to put on concerts – wearing her natural black hair and no makeup –
to raise money for her church.
She met frequently with Martin Luther King, Jr.–a fan of
her singing–to support his efforts to bring basic material comforts to blacks.
Bryant believed the struggle for civil rights to be the struggle for all people
who believed in God, but when she confronted her church, asking it to take a
stand against discrimination, the church refused with the reasoning, "But
these are of earthly matters and thus of no spiritual importance."
Disillusioned, Bryant returned to entertaining in the
1960s and trained with vocal teacher Frederick Wilkerson at Howard University,
which led to her winning a contract with the New York City Opera.
She also toured
internationally with the Italian, French, and Vienna Opera companies. She
returned to performing jazz in the 1980s and began a career as a vocal
instructor, with such clients as Jennifer Holliday, Phyllis Hyman, and Raquel
Welch. A documentary, entitled Joyce Bryant: The Lost Diva, is in the works.