Thelma Carpenter

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 of her popular recording collaborations was the mid-'40s "Hurry Home," featuring her with the Deep River Boys. She was also active in the film industry during the '40s, providing vocals for the music video precursors called "soundies" as well as dubbing songs for various actresses and even actors who were unable to sing in tune on their own when required to. In this capacity, one of her strangest credits was dubbing the vocal in for actor Ramsay Ames in the 1943 Crazy House. She also appeared regularly on radio broadcasts with vocalist Eddie Cantor, whose racist comments about the black Carpenter "crying tears of ink" got him in hot water. Live performance work, such as New York's many cabarets, kept her busy through the '50s, although it was certainly the decline of the big band era, and...