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Stick McGhee

Granville Henry "Stick" McGhee (March 23, 1918 – August 15, 1961) was an American jump blues guitarist, singer and songwriter, best known for his blues song "Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee", which he wrote with J. Mayo Williams

Early life
McGhee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee. He received his nickname when he was a child. He used a stick to push a wagon carrying his older brother Brownie McGhee, who had contracted polio. Granville began playing the guitar when he was thirteen years old. After his freshman year he dropped out of high school and worked with his father at the Eastman Kodak subsidiary, Tennessee Eastman Company in Kingsport. In 1940, Granville quit his job and moved to Portsmouth, Virginia, and then to New York City. He entered the military in 1942 and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After being discharged in 1946, he settled in New York.

Entertainment career
In the military, McGhee often played his guitar. One of the songs he performed was "Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee". The original lyrics of the song were as follows: Drinkin' that mess is our delight, And when we get drunk, start fightin' all night. Knockin' out windows and tearin' down doors, Drinkin' half-gallons and callin' for more. Drinkin' wine motherfucker, drinkin' wine! Goddam! Drinkin' wine motherfucker, drinkin' wine! Goddam! Drinkin' wine motherfucker, drinkin' wine! Goddam! Pass that bottle to me!"

It was one of the earliest prototypical rock-and-roll songs. Cover versions were recorded by Wynonie Harris, Lionel Hampton, Big John Greer, Johnny Burnette, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Mike Bloomfield's Electric Flag (as "Wine"). The song lent its name to the alcoholic fruit drink spodi. In 1946 Granville and Brownie McGhee wrote a version of the song that didn't use profanity. Harlem Records released the new version in January 1947. It sold for 49 cents. It did not get much airplay until two years later, when Stick re-created the song for Atlantic Records. It was on the Billboard R&B chart for almost half a year, rising to number 2, where it stayed for four weeks.

Numerous cover versions of his songs were recorded over the years. The first cover was by Lionel Hampton, featuring Sonny Parker; next was a cover by Wynonie Harris, followed by a hillbilly-bop version by Loy Gordon & His Pleasant Valley Boys. "Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee" continued to be popular throughout the 1950s in cover versions by various artists, including Malcolm Yelvington in 1954, Johnny Burnette in 1957, and Jerry Lee Lewis in 1959.

McGhee continued to make records for Atlantic and created popular songs such as "Tennessee Waltz Blues", "Drank Up All the Wine Last Night", "Venus Blues", "Let's Do It", and "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show", but his music career overall was not successful. McGhee moved from Atlantic to Essex Records, for which he recorded "My Little Rose". The record was not commercially successful, so he moved to King Records in 1953. There he recorded a number of rock-and-roll songs, such a "Whiskey, Women and Loaded Dice", "Head Happy with Wine", "Jungle Juice", "Six to Eight", "Double Crossin' Liquor", "Dealin' from the Bottom", and "Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter". However, he was unable to make money from his records, so he left King for Savoy Records in 1955. He retired from the music industry in 1960. In the late '50s McGhee recorded LP album tracks with Sonny Terry for the Folkways and Prestige-Bluesville labels. In 1960 he cut the songs "Sleep in Job" and "Money Fever" in New York with Sonny Terry. The tracks were released on Herald Records. This was McGhee's last recording session. He became ill shortly afterward and died in August 1961.

Death
McGhee died of lung cancer in The Bronx, New York, on August 15, 1961, at the age of forty-three. He left his old guitar to Brownie's son before he died.

Discography
With Sonny Terry
 * Sonny's Story (Bluesville, 1960)

title: Stick McGhee


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John Mitchel

John Mitchel (Seán Mistéal; 3 November 1815 – 20 March 1875) was an Irish nationalist writer and journalist chiefly renowned for his indictment of British policy in Ireland during the years of the Great Famine. Concluding that, in Ireland, legal and constitutional agitation was a "delusion", Mitchel broke first with Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association and then with his Young Ireland colleagues at the paper The Nation. In 1848, as editor of his own journal, United Irishman, he was convicted of seditious libel and sentenced to 14-years penal transportation for advocating James Fintan Lalor's programme of co-ordinated resistance to landlords and to the continued shipment of harvests to England.

Controversially for a republican tradition that has viewed Mitchel, in the words of Pádraic Pearse, as a "fierce" and "sublime" apostle of Irish republicanism, in American exile into which he escaped in 1853 Mitchel was an uncompromising pro-slavery partisan of the Southern secessionist cause. Embracing the illiberal and racial views of Thomas Carlyle, he was also opposed in Europe to Jewish emancipation.

In his last year, 1875, and while still resident in the United States, Mitchel was elected twice to the British Parliament from Tipperary on a platform of Irish Home Rule, tenant rights and free education. Exposing, as he saw it, the "fraudulent" nature of Irish representation at Westminster, on both occasions the results were set aside on the grounds of his previous felony.

Early life
John Mitchel was born at Camnish near Dungiven in County Londonderry, in the province of Ulster. His father, Rev. John Mitchel, was a Non-subscribing Presbyterian minister of Unitarian sympathies, and his mother was Mary (née Haslett) from Maghera. From 1823 until his death in 1840, John Sr. was minister in Newry, County Down. In Newry, Mitchel attended a school kept by a Dr Henderson whose encouragement and support laid the foundation for classical scholarship that at age 15 gained him entry to Trinity College, Dublin. After taking his degree at age 19 he worked briefly as a bank clerk in Derry, before entering legal practice in the office of a Newry solicitor, a friend of his father.

In the spring of 1836 Mitchel met Jane "Jenny" Verner, the only daughter of Captain James Verner. Despite family opposition, they became engaged in the autumn and were married in February 1837.

The couple's first child, John, was born in January the following year. Their second, James, (who was to be the father of the New York Mayor John Purroy Mitchel) was born in February 1840. Two further children were born, Henrietta in October 1842, and William in May 1844, in Banbridge, County Down, where as a qualified attorney Mitchel opened a new office for the Newry legal practice.

Early politics
One of Mitchel's first steps into Irish politics was to face down threats of Orange Order retaliation by helping arrange, in September 1839, a public dinner in Newry for Daniel O'Connell. O'Connell was the leader of the campaign to repeal the 1800 Acts of Union and restore an Irish Parliament.

Until his marriage, John Mitchel had by and large taken his politics from his father who, according to Mitchel's early biographer William Dillon, had "begun to comprehend the degradation of his countrymen". Soon after the granting of Catholic emancipation in 1829, the O'Connellites challenged the Protestant Ascendancy in Newry by running a Catholic parliamentary candidate. Many members of the Rev. Mitchel's congregation took an active part in the elections on the side of the Ascendancy, and pressed the Rev. Mitchel to do the same. His refusal to do earned him the nickname "Papist Mitchel."

In Banbridge, Mitchel was often employed by the Catholics in the legal proceedings arising from provocative, sometimes violent, Orange incursions into their districts. Seeing how cases were handled by magistrates, who were themselves often Orangemen, enraged Mitchel's sense of justice and spurred his interest in national politics and reform.

In October 1842, his friend John Martin sent Mitchel the first copy of The Nation produced in Dublin by Charles Gavan Duffy, who had previously been editor of the O'Connellite journal, The Vindicator, in Belfast, and by Thomas Osborne Davis, and John Blake Dillon. Martin and Davis were both, like Mitchell himself, Protestants and graduates of Trinity College. "I think The Nation will do very well", he wrote Martin, while at the same time revealing that he knew how the country "ought to take" news that an additional 20,000 troops were to be deployed to Ireland but would not put it on paper for fear of being arrested.

Succeeds Thomas Davis

Mitchel began to write for the Nation in February 1843. He co-authored an editorial with Thomas Davis, "the Anti-Irish Catholics", in which he embraced Davis's promotion of the Irish language and of Gaelic tradition as a non-sectarian basis for a common Irish nationality. Mitchel, however, did not share Davis's anti-clericalism, declining to support Davis as he sought to reverse O'Connell's opposition to the government's secular, or as O'Connell proposed "Godless", Colleges Bill.

Mitchel insisted that the government, aware that it would cause dissension, had introduced their bill for non-religious higher education to divide the national movement. But he also argued that religion is integral to education; that "all subjects of human knowledge and speculation (except abstract science)--and history most of all--are necessarily regarded from either a Catholic or a Protestant point of view, and cannot be understood or conceived at all if looked at from either, or from both". For Mitchel a cultural nationalism based on Ireland Gaelic heritage was intended not to displace the two religious traditions but rather serve as common ground between them.

When in September 1845, Davis unexpectedly died of scarlet fever, Duffy asked Mitchel to join the Nation as chief editorial writer. He left his legal practice in Newry, and brought his wife and children to live in Dublin, eventually settling in Rathmines. For the next two years Mitchel wrote both political and historical articles and reviews for The Nation. He reviewed the Speeches of John Philpot Curran, a pamphlet by Isaac Butt on The Protection of Home Industry, The Age of Pitt and Fox, and later on The Poets and Dramatists of Ireland, edited by Denis Florence MacCarthy (4 April 1846); The Industrial History of Free Nations, by Torrens McCullagh, and Father Meehan's The Confederation of Kilkenny (8 August 1846).

Responds to the Famine
Mitchel blamed the English for the famine. He wrote: "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine...and a million and a half men, women and children were carefully, prudently and peacefully slain by the English government".

On 25 October 1845, in article "The People's Food", Mitchel pointed to the failure of the potato crop, and warned landlords that pursuing their tenants for rents would force them to sell their other crops and starve. On 8 November, in "The Detectives", he wrote, "The people are beginning to fear that the Irish Government is merely a machinery for their destruction; ... that it is unable, or unwilling, to take a single step for the prevention of famine, for the encouragement of manufactures, or providing fields of industry, and is only active in promoting, by high premiums and bounties, the horrible manufacture of crimes!".

On 14 February 1846 Mitchel wrote again of the consequences of the previous autumn's potato crop losses, condemning the Government's inadequate response, and questioning whether it recognised that millions of people in Ireland who would soon have nothing to eat. On 28 February, he observed that the Coercion Bill, then going through the House of Lords, was "the only kind of legislation for Ireland that is sure to meet with no obstruction in that House". However they may differ about feeding the Irish people, the one thing all English parties were agreed upon was "the policy of taxing, prosecuting and ruining them."

In an article on "English Rule" on 7 March 1846, Mitchel wrote: "The Irish People are expecting famine day by day... and they ascribe it unanimously, not so much to the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England. ... They behold their own wretched food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth, and they see heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England; they see it and with every grain of that corn goes a heavy curse."

Lalor and the break with O'Connell
In June 1846 the Whigs, with whom O'Connell had worked against the Conservative ministry of Robert Peel, returned to office under Lord John Russell. Invoking new laissez-faire doctrines "political economy", they immediately set about dismantling Peel's limited, but practical, efforts to provide Ireland with food relief. O'Connell was left to plead for his country from the floor of the House of Commons: "She is in your hands—in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself. One-fourth of her population will perish unless Parliament comes to their relief". A broken man, on the advice of his doctors O'Connell took himself to the continent where, on route to Rome, he died in May 1847.

In the months before O'Connell's death, Duffy circulated letters received from James Fintan Lalor in which he argued that independence could be pursued only in a popular struggle for the land. While Lalor proposed that this should begin with a campaign to withhold rent, he suggested more might be required. Parts of the country were already in a state of semi-insurrection. Tenants conspirators, in the tradition of the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen, were attacking process servers, intimidating land agents, and resisting evictions. Lalor advised only against a general uprising, as he believed the Irish people could not militarily defeat the British garrison in Ireland.

Having abandoned the hopes he had entertained with Duffy that landlords might rally to Repeal, and notwithstanding that his own ideas of agrarian reform extended little further than Tenant Right, Mitchel embraced Lalor's vision of agrarian agitation as the cutting edge of a national struggle. When the London journal the Standard observed that the new Irish railways could be used to transport government troops to quickly curb agrarian unrest, Mitchel responded that the tracks could be turned into pikes and trains ambushed. O’Connell publicly distanced himself from The Nation, appearing to some to set Duffy, as the editor, up for prosecution. In the case that followed, Mitchel successfully defended Duffy in court. O'Connell and his son John were determined to press the issue. On the threat of their own resignations, they carried a resolution in the Repeal Association declaring that under no circumstances was a nation justified in asserting its liberties by force of arms.

The grouping around the Nation that O'Connell had taken to calling "Young Ireland", a reference to Giuseppe Mazzini's anti-clerical and insurrectionist Young Italy, withdrew from the Repeal Association. In January 1847, they formed themselves anew as the Irish Confederation with, in Michael Doheny words, the "independence of the Irish nation" the objective and "no means to attain that end abjured, save such as were inconsistent with honour, morality and reason". But unable to secure a pronouncement in favour of Lalor's policy of building a campaign of resistance around tenant grievances, Mitchel soon broke with his confederates.

Admiration for Carlyle, and opposition to black and Jewish emancipation

Duffy suggests that Mitchel had already been on a path that would see him break not only with O'Connell but also with Duffy himself and other Young Irelanders. Mitchel had fallen under the influence of Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, a High Tory notorious for his antipathy toward liberal notions of enlightenment and progress.

In the Nation of 10 January 1846, Mitchel reviewed Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845), a book by Carlyle that had been publicly condemned by O'Connell only two weeks prior. Despite Mitchel himself waxing indignant at Oliver Cromwell's conduct in Ireland, Carlyle was pleased: he believed Mitchel had conceded Cromwell's essential greatness. Mitchel had just published his own hagiography of the Ulster rebel chieftain Hugh O'Neill, which both Duffy and Davis had found excessively "Carlylean". Mitchel's book was a success: "an early incursion of Carlylean thought into the romantic construction of the Irish nation that was to dominate militant Irish politics for a century." It embraced views which Carlyle had espoused in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841) and denounced British rule in Ireland, perceiving it to be suppressing Irish culture "in the name of Civilisation".

When in May 1846 Mitchel first met Carlyle in a delegation with Duffy in London, he wrote to John Martin describing the historian's presence as "royal, almost Godlike", and did so even while acknowledging Carlyle's unbending unionism. Hosted by Mitchel in September 1846 in Dublin, Carlyle recalled "a fine elastic-spirited young fellow" but upon whom Carlyle's own arguments "were thrown away". This might have been true with regard to the value of the union. But when Carlyle drew derogatory comparisons (as other commentators had done) between Irish cottiers and the allegedly-indolent descendants of enslaved Afro-Caribbeans, Mitchel's response was not to join O'Connell in proclaiming himself "the friend of liberty in every clime, class and colour" Rather, it was to insist on a racial distinction between the Irish and the "negro". This Duffy had discovered in 1847 when he conceded temporary editorship of the Nation to Mitchel.

Duffy found that he had lent a journal, "recognised throughout the world as the mouthpiece of Irish rights", to "the monstrous task of applauding negro slavery and of denouncing the emancipation of the Jews," another of O'Connell's liberal causes against which Mitchel stood with Carlyle. It was not only that Mitchel claimed (as others had done) that Irish cottiers were treated worse than black slaves. Nor was it that Mitchel decried as inopportune O'Connell's harping upon "the vile union" in the United States "of republicanism and slavery". Duffy himself was fearful of the impact of O'Connell's vocal abolitionism upon American support and funding. It was that Mitchel argued (with Carlyle) that slavery was "the best state of existence for the negro".

According to Duffy, when he confronted Carlyle with Mitchel's overt racism, Carlyle responded that Mitchel "would be found to be right in the end; the black man could not be emancipated from the laws of nature, which had pronounced a very decided decree on the question, and neither could the Jew."

The United Irishman
At the end of 1847 Mitchel resigned his position as leader writer on The Nation. He later explained that he had come to regard as "absolutely necessary a more vigorous policy against the English Government than that which William Smith O'Brien, Charles Gavan Duffy and other Young Ireland leaders were willing to pursue". He "had watched the progress of the famine policy of the Government, and could see nothing in it but a machinery, deliberately devised, and skilfully worked, for the entire subjugation of the island—the slaughter of portion of the people, and the pauperization of the rest," and he had therefore "come to the conclusion that the whole system ought to be met with resistance at every point."

He was convinced too, that rendered acute by the famine, the agrarian question had the potential to surmount the north-south sectarian division, and to realise the unity that had been sought in '98. As "An Ulsterman for Ireland", he ridiculed the Orangeism of the landed Ascendancy, reminding "the farmers, labourers and artisans of the north of Ireland" that:"My Lord Enniskillen . . . is apprehensive not lest you be evicted by landlords, and sent to the poorhouse, but lest purgatory and the Seven Sacraments be down your throats.. . . The Seven Sacraments are, to be sure, very dangerous, but the quarter-acre-clause [conditioning access to poor relief] touches you more nearly . . . [B]end all your energies to resisting the 'encroachments of Popery' you thereby perpetuate British dominion in Ireland and keep the 'Empire' going yet a little while. Irish landlordism has made a covenant with British government in these terms—'Keep down for me my tenantry, my peasantry, my 'masses' in due submission with your troops and laws, and I will garrison the island for you and hold it as your liege-man and vassal for ever.'"While decrying the "fatal cant of moral force", and admitting no principle that distinguished his position from the "conspirators of Ninety-Eight" (the original United Irishmen), Mitchel emphasised that he was not recommending "an immediate insurrection": in the "present broken and divided condition" of the country "the people would be butchered". With Fintan Lalor he urged "passive resistance". The people should "obstruct and render impossible the transport and shipment of Irish provisions" and, by intimidation, suppress bidding for grain or cattle if brought "to auction under distress"—a method that had demonstrated its effectiveness in the Tithe War. Such actions would be illegal, but such was his opposition to British rule that in Mitchel's view, no opinion in Ireland was "worth a farthing which is not illegal".

The first number of Mitchel's own paper, United Irishman, appeared on 12 February 1848. The Prospectus announced that as editor Mitchel would be "aided by Thomas Devin Reilly, John Martin of Loughorne and other competent contributors" who were likewise convinced that "Ireland really and truly wants to be freed from English dominion." No other object defined their purpose: if he was a republican now, Mitchel privately confessed that it was "only because this spirit democratic spirit is the most formidable enemy to British dominion in Ireland". He was "no bigot as to forms of government".

Under a masthead that included Wolfe Tone caution that "if the men of property" failed in their allegiance to the national cause, it could yet triumph with "the aid of that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property," The United Irishman declared: That the Irish people had a distinct and indefeasible right to their country, and to all the moral and material wealth and resources thereof, ... as a distinct Sovereign State ...;

That the property of the farmers and labourers of Ireland is as sacred as the property of all the noblemen and gentlemen in Ireland, and also immeasurably more valuable;

That the custom called ‘Tenant Right,’ which prevails partially in the North of Ireland, is a just and salutary custom both for North and South ...;

That every man in Ireland who shall hereafter pay taxes for the support of the State, shall have a just right to an equal voice with every other man in the government ...

That all ‘legal and constitutional agitation’ in Ireland is a delusion;

That every freeman, and every man who desired to become free, ought to have arms, and to practise the use of them.

That no combination of classes in Ireland is desirable, just, or possible, save on the terms of the rights of the industrious classes being acknowledged and secured; [and]

That no good thing can come from the English Parliament, or the English Government. In the first editorial, addressed to "The Right Hon. the Earl of Clarendon, Englishman, calling himself Her Majesty's Lord Lieutenant – General and General Governor of Ireland," Mitchel stated that the purpose of the journal was to resume the struggle which had been waged by Tone and Emmet, the Holy War to sweep this Island clear of the English name and nation." Lord Clarendon was also addressed as "Her Majesty's Executioner-General and General Butcher of Ireland".

Commenting on this first edition of The United Irishman, Lord Stanley in the House of Lords, on 24 February 1848, maintained that the paper pursued "the purpose of exciting sedition and rebellion among her Majesty's subjects in Ireland..., and to promote civil war for the purpose of exterminating every Englishman in Ireland". He allowed that the publishers were "honest" men: "they are not the kind of men who make their patriotism the means of barter for place or pension. They are not to be bought off by the Government of the day for a colonial place, or by a snug situation in the customs or excise. No; they honestly repudiate this course; they are rebels at heart, and they are rebels avowed, who are in earnest in what they say and propose to do".

Only 16 editions of The United Irishman had been produced when Mitchel was arrested, and the paper suppressed. Mitchel concluded his last article in The United Irishman, from Newgate prison, entitled "A Letter to Farmers","[My] gallant Confederates ... have marched past my prison windows to let me know that there are ten thousand fighting men in Dublin— 'felons' in heart and soul. I thank God for it. The game is afoot, at last. The liberty of Ireland may come sooner or come later, by peaceful negotiation or bloody conflict— but it is sure; and wherever between the poles I may chance to be, I will hear the crash of the down fall of the thrice-accursed British Empire.'"

Arrest and deportation
On 15 April 1848, a grand jury was called on to indict not only Mitchel, but also his former associates on the Nation O'Brien and Thomas Francis Meagher for "seditious libels". When the cases against O'Brien and Meagher fell through, thanks in part to Isaac Butt's able defence, under new legislation the government replaced the charges against Mitchel with Treason Felony punishable by transportation for life. To justify the severity of the new measures, under which Mitchel was arrested in May, the Home Secretary thought it sufficient to read extracts from Mitchel's articles and speeches.

Convicted in June by a jury he dismissed as "packed" (as "not empanelled even according to the law of England"), Mitchel was sentenced to be "transported beyond the seas for the term of fourteen years." From the dock he declared that he was satisfied that he had "shown what the law is made of in Ireland", and that he regretted nothing: "the course which I have opened is only commenced". Others would follow.

Accommodated as a gentleman rather than as a common criminal, Mitchel was carried aboard the steamer HMS Scourge to Ireland Island in the "Imperial fortress" of Bermuda. After a year of acute ill health aboard the Prison hulk HMS Dromedary, he was re-embarked for the Cape Colony on The Nautilus. Once The Nautilus reached the Cape it was refused docking or supply during the Convict crisis of 1849 and remained anchored off the coast for 5 months before sailing on to the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land (modern-day Tasmania, Australia) to which O'Brien, Martin, Meagher, and other Young Irelanders, had been transported in the wake of their abortive July 1848 rising.

Aboard ship, he began writing his Jail Journal, in which he reiterated his call for national unity and resistance. Accepting a ticket of leave in Tasmania, he and Martin lived together at Bothwell, in a house still known as Mitchel's Cottage. His wife and children joined him in Bothwell in June 1851. In August, they move onto a two hundred-acre farm which they worked with convict labour. While he admitted to "living as peacefully as they ever did in Banbridge", after Meagher broke his parole in January 1852 and reached New York, Mitchel determined to join him.

United States
Assisted by Patrick James ("Nicaragua") Smyth, an agent of the New York Irish Directory, in June 1853 Mitchel escaped from Van Diemen's Land and made his way (via Tahiti, San Francisco, Nicaragua and Cuba) to New York City. He soon outlived the hero's welcome he received. Among his contributions to the Irish Citizen (a joint venture with Meagher) was a defence of slavery in the southern states that occasioned "much surprise and general rebuke".

Pro-slavery Confederate
Once in the United States, Mitchel did not hesitate to repeat the claim that negroes were "an innately inferior people". In what was only the second edition the Irish Citizen, he declared that it was not a crime "or even a peccadillo to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful correction", and that he himself, might wish for "a good plantation well-stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama". Subject to widely-circulated broadsides from the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher and the French republican exile Alexandre Holinski, the remarks triggered a public furore. In Dublin, the Irish Confederation convened an emergency meeting to protest reports in American and British press outlets which "erroneously attributed" Mitchel's proslavery thought "to the Young Ireland party".

Provoked by the nativist hostility they encountered in the United States, Mitchel was to further distance his countrymen from the African American by elevating them within the white race. In 1858 he told an audience in New York that "nearly all the great men which Europe has produced have been Celts".

In correspondence with his friend, the Roman Catholic priest John Kenyon, Mitchel revealed his wish to make the people of the U.S. "proud and fond of [slavery] as a national institution, and [to] advocate its extension by re-opening the trade in Negroes". Slavery he promoted for "its own sake". It was "good in itself" for "to enslave [Africans] is impossible or to set them free either. They are born and bred slaves". The Catholic Church might condemn the "enslavement of men", but this censure could not apply to "negro slaves".

The value and virtue of slavery, "both for negroes and white men", Mitchel maintained from 1857 in the pages of the Southern Citizen, a paper he moved in 1859 from Knoxville, Tennessee to Washington D.C. The paper circulated widely through Hibernian societies of the south. Among these it was commonplace to propose that the American slave had nothing to envy in the freedom of the Irish tenant-at-will, the cottier family in Ireland that the landlord might set out in the roadside ditch. In 1854, in a widely reported address to the graduating class of University of Virginia, he had linked Britain's abolitionism to her laissez-faire indifference to the Irish famine. He had also credited slavery with the contrast between southern gentility and Yankee brusqueness.

Mitchel's wife, Jenny, had her reservations. Nothing, she said, would induce her "to become the mistress of a slave household". Her objection to slavery was "the injury it does to the white masters". There is no record or suggestion of Mitchel, himself, holding any person in bondage. When he briefly farmed in eastern Tennessee it was from a log cabin and, reportedly, with a "colored man" employed only "if he could not get a white man to work".

While championing the South, in the summer of 1859 Mitchel detected the possibility of a breach between France and England, from which Ireland might benefit. He travelled to Paris as an American correspondent, but found the talk of war had been much exaggerated. After the secession from the American Union of several Southern states in February 1861 and the bombardment of Fort Sumter (during which his son John commanded a South Carolina battery), Mitchel was anxious to return. He reached New York in September and made his way to the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia. There he edited the Daily Enquirer, the semi-official organ of secessionists' president, Jefferson Davis.

Mitchel drew a parallel between the American South and Ireland: both were agricultural economies tied to an unjust union. The Union States and England were "..the commercial, manufacturing and money-broking power ... greedy, grabbing, griping and grovelling". Abraham Lincoln he described as "... an ignoramus and a boor; not an apostle at all; no grand reformer, not so much as an abolitionist, except by accident – a man of very small account in every way."

The Mitchels lost both their youngest son Willie in the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, and their son John, returned to Fort Sumter, in July the following year.

After the reverse at Gettysburg, Mitchel became increasingly disillusioned with Davis's leadership. In December 1863 he resigned from the Enquirer and became the leader writer for the Richmond Examiner, regularly attacking Davis for what he saw as misplaced chivalry, especially his failure to retaliate in kind for Federal attacks on civilians.

On slavery, Mitchel remained uncompromising. As the South's manpower reserves depleted, Generals Robert E. Lee and Patrick Cleburne (a native of County Cork) proposed that slaves should be offered their freedom in return for military service. Although he had been among the first to claim that slavery had not been the cause of the conflict but simply the pretext for northern aggression, Mitchel objected: to allow blacks their freedom was to concede that the South had been in the wrong from the start. His biographer Anthony Russell notes that it was "with no trace of irony at all", that Mitchel wrote:

"...if freedom be a reward for negroes – that is, if freedom be a good thing for negroes – why, then it is, and always was, a grievous wrong and crime to hold them in slavery at all. If it be true that the state of slavery keeps these people depressed below the condition to which they could develop their nature, their intelligence, and their capacity for enjoyment, and what we call 'progress' then every hour of their bondage for generations is a black stain upon the white race."

This might have suggested that Mitchel was open to revising his view of slavery. But he remained defiant to the end, going so far as to "raise the blasphemous doubt" as to whether General Robert E. Lee was "a 'good Southerner'; that is whether he is thoroughly satisfied of the justice and beneficence of negro slavery".

Mitchel would make no allowances. After the war a Union officer who claimed to have "loved John Mitchel, the Irish patriot, with a purer devotion" than any in Ireland, reported to a Boston paper that, when, as prisoners in Richmond, he and a fellow Irishman contacted his former idol, not only did Mitchel refuse to have anything to do with "Lincoln's hirelings," but in the next issue of the Examiner he "directed the citizens to treat this human fungi not as prisoners of war, but as 'robbers, murderers and assassins!'"

Frederick Douglass, who in visiting Ireland believed her dispossessed were bound in sorrow at their circumstances with the enslaved in America, accounted Mitchel a “vulgar traitor to liberty.”

At odds with Irish America
At war's end in 1865 Mitchel moved to New York and edited the New York Daily News. That same year, his continued defence of southern secession caused him to be arrested in the offices of the paper and interned at Fort Monroe, Virginia, where Jefferson Davis and Senator Clement Claiborne Clay (accused of conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln) were the only other prisoners. A new Irish republican organisation, the Fenian Brotherhood, lobbied for his release which was secured on condition that he left America. Mitchel returned to Paris where he acted as Fenians' financial agent.

Following their raids into Ontario and New Brunswick in June 1866, opposing Fenian factions proposed to unite under Mitchel's leadership. But Mitchel objected to asking people for large contributions under the delusion that, with England at peace, further military operations could be mounted whether in Canada or in Ireland. He resigned from the Brotherhood, and returned to New York where, after writing for the Daily News, he resumed publication of the Irish Citizen.

Mitchel's anti-Reconstruction, pro-Democratic editorial line was opposed in New York by another Ulster Protestant, the IRB exile David Bell. Bell's "Journal of Liberty, Literature, and Social Progress", Irish Republic, cautioned readers "interested in the labor question" from associating themselves with John Mitchel. Mitchel, a "miserable man", was the proponent of a "diabolical" Democratic Party plan to impose upon blacks in the South, "as a substitute for chattel slavery, a system of serfdom scarcely less hateful than the institution it is intended to practically prolong". The policy was nothing less than "an attempt to attach to the laborer in America those medieval conditions which even Russia [ Emancipation of the Serfs, 1861 ] has rejected".

The revived Citizen failed to attract readers and folded in July 1872; Bell's Irish Republic followed a year later. Neither paper was in sympathy with the ethnic-minority Catholicism powerfully represented by the city's Tammany Hall Democratic-Party political machine and, until his death in 1864, by the authority of a third Ulsterman, Archbishop John Hughes. Mitchel dedicated his paper to "aspirants to the privileges of American citizenship", arguing that the more integrated (or "more lost") among American citizens the Irish in America were "the better".

Already In 1854, for comments critical of the Pope's temporal powers, Mitchel had earned "wrath" of the Archbishop. But, like Mitchel, Hughes had suggested that the conditions of "starving laborers" in the North were often worse than that of slaves in the South, and in 1842 he had urged his flock not to sign O'Connell's abolitionist petition ("An Address of the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America") which he regarded as unnecessarily provocative. Nonetheless, Hughes used Mitchel's stance on slavery to discredit him: as Mitchel saw it, "copying the abolition press to cast an Alabama plantation" in his "teeth".

Final campaign: Tipperary elections
In July 1874 Mitchel received an enthusiastic reception in Ireland (a procession of ten thousand people escorted him to his hotel in Cork). The Freeman’s Journal opined that: "After the lapse of a quarter of a century – after the loss of two of his sons … John Mitchel again treads his native land, a prematurely aged, enfeebled man. Whatever the opinions as to the wisdom of his course … none can deny the respect due to honest of purpose and fearlessness of heart".

Back in New York City on 8 December 1874, Mitchel lectured on "Ireland Revisited" at the Cooper Institute, an event organised by the Clan-na-Gael and attended by among other prominent nationalists Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. While his visit to Ireland was ostensibly private, Mitchel revealed that he had been pressed to stand for British Parliament and that it was his intention, if any vacancy should occur, to offer himself as a candidate so that he might "get the Irish members to put in operation the plan suggested by O’Connell at one time, of declining to attend in Parliament altogether, that is, to try to discredit and explode the fraudulent pretence of representation in the Parliament of Britain". In the same speech, Mitchel dismissed the Irish Home Rule movement: "the fact that this Home Rule League [his friend John Martin among them] goes to Parliament and sets it hope therein, puts me in indignation against the Home Rule League … they are not Home Rulers but Foreign Rulers. Now it is painful for me to say even so much in disparagement of so excellent a body of men as they are … after a little while they will be bought". The call from Ireland came sooner than expected. In January 1875 a bye-election was called for a parliamentary seat in Tipperary. Stung by his remarks in New York, the Irish Parliamentary Party was reluctant to endorse Mitchel's nomination. although they may have been confused as to his position. Before re-embarking for Ireland, Mitchel issued an election address in which he declared for "Home Rule"—but, straddling positions, defining this as "sovereign independence for Ireland"—together with free education, universal tenant rights, and the freeing of Fenian prisoners. As it was, on 17 February, while still approaching the Irish shore, Mitchel was elected unopposed. As had been the case for O'Donovan Rossa who had been returned for very same constituency in 1869, his election was unavailing. On the motion of Benjamin Disraeli, the House of Commons by a large majority declared Mitchel, as a felon, ineligible. Mitchel ran again as an Independent Nationalist in the resulting March by-election, and in a contest took 80 percent of the vote.

Death and commemoration
Mitchel died at Drumalane, his parents' house in Newry, on 20 March 1875. His last letter, published on St. Patrick's Day, 17 March 1875, expressed his gratitude to the voters of Tipperary for supporting him in exposing the 'fraudulent' system of Irish representation in Parliament. An election petition had been lodged. Observing that voters in Tipperary had known that Mitchel was ineligible, the courts awarded the seat to Mitchel's Conservative opponent.

Mitchel was survived, in the United States, by his wife and his son James (father of John Purroy Mitchel who was to be a reform-minded mayor of New York City). At Mitchel's funeral in Newry, his friend John Martin collapsed, and died a week later (he was succeeded as MP for County Meath by Charles Stewart Parnell).

On the day Mitchel died, the Tipperary paper The Nenagh Guardian offered "An American View of John Mitchel": a syndicated piece from the Chicago Tribune that declared Mitchel a "recreant to liberty", a defender of slavery and secession with whom "the Union masses of the American people" could have "little sympathy". Obituaries for Mitchel looked elsewhere to qualify their acknowledgement of his patriotic devotion.

The Home-Rule Freeman’s Journal wrote of Mitchel: "we may lament his persistence in certain lines of action which his intelligence must have suggested to him could have but been futile issue … his love for Ireland may have been imprudent. But he loved her with a devotion unexcelled". The Standard, with which Mitchel had contended in 1847, concluded: "His powers through life, however, were marred by want of judgment, obstinate opinionativeness [sic], and a factiousness which disabled him from ever acting long enough with any set of men".

Pádraic Pearse placed Mitchel in succession to Theobald Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, and James Fintan Lalor and hailed Mitchel's "gospel of Irish nationalism" as the "fiercest and most sublime". Sinn Féin leader Arthur Griffith was adamant that it detracted nothing from Mitchel's greatness that he severed "the case for Irish independence from theories of humanitarianism and universalism". No excuse was needed "for an Irish Nationalist declining to hold the negro his peer in right".

Comparing him to Thomas Davis, W. B. Yeats concluded that a "harsh Ulster character, made hasher still by the tragedy of the famine, and the rhetoric of Carlyle" had a political influence that was "almost wholly mischievous". Mitchel "played upon international suspicion and exalted hatred of England above the love of Ireland that Davis would have taught us".

In the decades following his death, branches of the Irish National Land League were named in Mitchel's honour. There are at least ten Gaelic Athletic Association clubs named after Mitchel, including one based in his home town, Newry and two in County Londonderry, his county of birth – one in Claudy and another in Glenullin. Mitchel Park is named after him in Dungiven, near his birthplace, as is Mitchell County, Iowa, in the United States. Fort Mitchel on Spike Island, Cork from which he was transported in 1848 is named in his honour.

During the movement to remove statues following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a petition receiving over 1,200 signatures called for the statue in John Mitchel Place, Newry, to be removed and the site renamed "Black Lives Matter Plaza". Newry, Mourne and Down District Council agreed only to "proceed to clarify responsibility for the John Mitchel statue, develop options for an education programme, identify the origins of John Mitchel Place and give consideration as to other potential issues in relation to slavery within the council area". Mitchel's recent biographer, Anthony Russell argues that Mitchel's stand on slavery was not an aberration. His rejection of philanthropic liberalism was equal to his disdain for "free labour" political economy. In his Jail Journal Mitchel urged capital punishment for crimes such as burglary, forgery and robbery. The "reformation of offenders" was not, he argued, "the reasonable object of criminal punishment": "Why hang them, hang them….you have no right to make the honest people support the rogues….and for 'ventilation'… I would ventilate the rascals in front of the county jails at the end of a rope".

As for slavery in the American South, in his biography William Dillon proposes that for Mitchel it was a "practical issue". Faced with the alternative of a social system of the North in which the relation of master to servant was regulated by competition, "He took his stand in favour of the system that seemed to him the better of the two; and as was his habit, he took it decisively".

Mitchel is remembered for his involvement in radical nationalism, and in particular for writings such as "Jail Journal", "The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps)", "The History of Ireland", "An Apology for the British Government in Ireland", and the less well known "The Life and times of Hugh O'Neill". He was described by Charles Gavan Duffy as "a trumpet to awake the slothful to the call of duty; and the Irish people".

Books by John Mitchel

 * The Life and Times of Hugh O'Neill, James Duffy, 1845
 * 1641: A Reply to the Falsification of History by James Anthony Froude, Entitled 'The English in Ireland', Cameron & Ferguson, Glasgow, 1847?.
 * Jail Journal, or, Five Years in British Prisons, Office of the "Citizen", New York, 1854
 * Poems of James Clarence Mangan (Introduction), P. M. Haverty, New York, 1859
 * An Apology for the British Government in Ireland, Irish National Publishing Association, 1860
 * The History of Ireland, from the Treaty of Limerick to the Present Time, Cameron & Ferguson, Glasgow, 1864
 * The Poems of Thomas Davis (Introduction), D. & J. Sadlier & Co., New York, 1866
 * The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), Lynch, Cole & Meehan 1873 (originally appeared in the Southern Citizen, 1858)
 * The Crusade of the Period, Lynch, Cole & Meehan 1873

Biographies of Mitchel

 * The life of John Mitchel, William Dillon, (London, 1888) 2 Vols.
 * Life of John Mitchel, P.A. Sillard, James Duffy and Co., Ltd 1908
 * John Mitchel: An Appreciation, P.S. O'Hegarty, Maunsel & Company, Ltd 1917
 * Mitchel's Election a National Triumph, Charles J. Rosebault, J. Duffy, 1917
 * Irish Mitchel, Seamus MacCall, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd 1938
 * John Mitchel: First Felon for Ireland, Edited By Brian O'Higgins, Brian O'Higgins 1947
 * John Mitchel Noted Irish Lives, Louis J. Walsh, The Talbot Press Ltd 1934
 * ''John Mitchel, Ó Cathaoir, Brendan (Clódhanna Teoranta, Dublin, 1978)
 * John Mitchel, A Cause Too Many, Aidan Hegarty, Camlane Press 2005
 * John Mitchel, James Quinn, Dublin University College Press, 2008.
 * John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist, Bryan McGovern, (Knoxville, University of Tennessee, 2009)
 * Between Two Flags: John Mitchel & Jenny Verner, Anthony Russell (Dublin, Merion Press, 2015)
 * Fanatic Heart, Tom Keneally, Vintage, 2022.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: John Mitchel


text:
John Mitchell

John Mitchell may refer to:

Arts

 * John Mitchell, American jazz banjoist who has worked with Johnny Dunn
 * John Mitchell, Canadian ice dancer in the 1962 World Figure Skating Championships
 * John Mitchell (minister) (1794–1870), American minister and author
 * John Mitchell (musician) (born 1973), lead singer and guitarist for UK band It Bites, and music producer
 * John Ames Mitchell (1844–1918), American illustrator
 * John Cameron Mitchell (born 1963), American filmmaker
 * John Campbell Mitchell (1861–1922), Scottish landscape artist
 * John Grant Mitchell (actor) (1874–1957), American character actor in the 1930s and 1940s
 * John Hanson Mitchell (born 1940), American author
 * John Mitch Mitchell (1946–2008), English musician
 * John R. Mitchell (poet) (1940–2006), poet and a professor of English
 * John W. Mitchell (1917–2005), British sound engineer
 * John Wendell Mitchell (1880–1951), Canadian author

Business

 * John Mitchell Jr. (1863–1929), editor of the Richmond Planet, a newspaper in Richmond, Virginia's Jackson Ward community
 * John Mitchell (United Mine Workers) (1870–1919), president of the United Mine Workers
 * John Francis Mitchell (1928–2009), vice chairman, Motorola; inventor of the mobile cell phone
 * John G. Mitchell (editor) (died 2007), American editor of National Geographic magazine
 * John J. Mitchell (banker) (1853–1927), Chicago-based banker, president of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank
 * Jack Mitchell (banker) (1897–1985), American banker, co-founder of United Airlines
 * John Mitchell (merchant) (1786–1881), Glasgow cork merchant and ship owner.

Military

 * John Mitchell (born 1785), British Army officer and author
 * John Mitchell (Medal of Honor), American Indian Wars soldier and Medal of Honor recipient, see Company I, 5th US Infantry
 * John Mitchell (RAF officer) (1888–1964), RAF officer
 * John G. Mitchell (general) (1838–1894), American Civil War general
 * John J. Mitchell (Medal of Honor) (1846–1898), American Indian Wars soldier and Medal of Honor recipient, see Company L, 8th US Cavalry
 * John K. Mitchell (1811–1889), Confederate Navy commander during the American Civil War, see USS Alpha (1864)
 * John Lewis Mitchell (1918–2016), RAF Air Commodore
 * John R. C. Mitchell, United States naval aviator, see June 1955
 * John W. Mitchell (United States Air Force) (1915–1995), US Air Force officer, flying ace and the leader of Operation Vengeance
 * John Wesley Mitchell (1891–1969), Australian soldier
 * John Merrill (Medal of Honor) (1846–1883), American Indian Wars soldier and Medal of Honor recipient

United States

 * John Mitchell (Pennsylvania politician) (1781–1849), United States Congressman from Pennsylvania
 * John Mitchell (United Mine Workers) (1870–1919), labor leader
 * John Mitchell Jr. (politician) or "Larry" (born 1954), American politician and member of the Delaware House of Representatives
 * John H. Mitchell (1835–1905), American politician and senator from Oregon
 * John H. Mitchell (Iowa politician) (1899–1992), Iowa state representative and attorney general
 * John I. Mitchell (1838–1907), United States Senator from Pennsylvania
 * John Joseph Mitchell (1873–1925), United States Representative from Massachusetts
 * John L. Mitchell (1842–1904), American politician from Wisconsin and father of Gen. Billy Mitchell
 * John M. Mitchell (1858–1905), United States Representative from New York
 * John N. Mitchell (1913–1988), United States Attorney General and Watergate conspirator
 * John Purroy Mitchel (1879–1918), mayor of New York
 * John Ridley Mitchell (1877–1962), United States Representative from Tennessee

Other countries

 * John Mitchel (1815–1875), Irish nationalist and politician
 * John Mitchell (Australian politician) (1869–1943), member of the Victorian Parliament
 * John Mitchell (Hull politician) (c. 1781–1859), Member of Parliament for Kingston-upon-Hull
 * John Mitchell (MP for City of London)
 * John Mitchell (MP for Truro), British politician
 * John F. Mitchell (1862–1943), Canadian politician
 * John Matthew Mitchell (1925–2019), Assistant Director-General, British Council
 * John Thomas Whitehead Mitchell (1828–1895), British co-operative activist
 * John Walker Mitchell (1832–1914), Scottish-born New Zealand politician
 * John William Mitchell (1872–1952), mayor of Calgary, Alberta

Science

 * John Mitchell (geographer) (1711–1768), colonial American physician, botanist, and geographer
 * John Kearsley Mitchell (1798–1858), American physician
 * John Mitchell (physicist) (1913–2007), New Zealand born physicist
 * J. Murray Mitchell (1928–1990), American climatologist
 * John F. B. Mitchell (born 1948), British climatologist/climate modeller
 * John C. Mitchell, computer scientist
 * John Mitchell (chemist), American chemist and materials scientist

Baseball

 * John Mitchell (outfielder) (1937–2020), Negro league outfielder
 * John Mitchell (pitcher) (born 1965), Major League Baseball pitcher, 1986–1990
 * Johnny Mitchell (baseball) (1894–1965), baseball shortstop, 1921–1925

Ice hockey

 * John Mitchell (ice hockey, born 1895) (1895–1957), Canadian ice hockey player with the Regina Capitals and Duluth Hornets
 * John Mitchell (ice hockey, born 1985), National Hockey League player with the Colorado Avalanche

Other sports

 * John Mitchell (administrator), president of the Melbourne Football Club and the Melbourne Cricket Club
 * John Mitchell (American football coach) (born 1951), coach and 1st African-American to play football for University of Alabama
 * John Mitchell (Australian footballer) (1891–1962), Australian rules footballer for South Melbourne
 * John Mitchell (cricketer) (born 1947), New Zealand cricketer
 * John Mitchell (footballer, born 1800s) (fl. 1879–1891), footballer for Doncaster Rovers, Newton Heath and Bolton Wanderers
 * John Mitchell (footballer, born 1952), English footballer
 * John Mitchell (hurler) (born 1946), Irish retired hurler and manager
 * John Mitchell (rugby union) (born 1964), rugby player and coach
 * John T. Mitchell (1854–1914), whist and bridge player
 * Johnny Mitchell (born 1971), American football tight end

Others

 * John Mitchell (historian) (1941–2021), New Zealand historian
 * John Murray Mitchell (missionary) (1815–1904), Scottish missionary and orientalist
 * John Mitchell (Being Human), a character in the television series Being Human
 * SS John Mitchell (1906), an American lake freighter
 * SS John Mitchell (1942), a Liberty ship

title: John Mitchell


text:
The Treniers

The Treniers (pronounced /trəˈniərz/) were an American R&B and jump blues musical group led by identical twins Cliff and Claude Trenier. They were originally billed as the Trenier Twins, who performed alongside the Gene Gilbeaux Quartet, but shortened their name to the Treniers when Gilbeaux and other musicians became integral members of the group. Besides the Trenier brothers, group members included Don Hill on saxophone, Shifty Henry and later James (Jimmy) Johnson on bass, Henry (Tucker) Green on drums and Gene Gilbeaux on piano. Later, additional Trenier brothers Milt and Buddy, and nephew Skip, joined the group on vocals, and there were many other musician and line-up changes over the years including Herman Washington and Mickey Baker on guitar.

Career
The band was based around twins Clifton L. "Cliff" Trenier (July 14, 1919 – March 2, 1983) and Claude Oliver Trenier (July 14, 1919 – November 17, 2003). They were born in Mobile, Alabama, and formed the Alabama State Collegians when in college together in 1939. In 1943, Claude Trenier left to join Jimmie Lunceford's band as lead singer, and Cliff joined him the following year. The twins left the Lunceford band in 1947 and began performing together as the Trenier Twins, backed by the Gene Gilbeaux Quartet which included Gene Gilbeaux on piano and Don Hill on alto sax. They made their first recordings for Mercury Records in 1947, and developed a strong reputation for their live performances. In 1949, they were joined by older brother Buddy Trenier (December 11, 1913 – March 15, 1999), and started to be billed as "The Rockin' Rollin' Treniers".

They played a form of music intermediate between swing and early rock and roll. Though their sound is more swing influenced, the Treniers incorporated a thumping backbeat and several songs that included the words "rock" and "roll" - "Rocking on Sunday Night" and "It Rocks! It Rolls! It Swings!", for example, and in the 1940s were already playing "Rockin' Is Our Bizness," which was inspired by Jimmie Lunceford's "Rhythm Is Our Business" from the 1930s. They were also known for the humorous content of many of their songs, and their on stage acrobatics were seen as precursors to the wild antics of many later rock and roll groups. Their lively stage presentation influenced Bill Haley and Comets, The Shadows in the UK in 1959, Paul Revere and Raiders, and beyond.

They had their only national chart hit in 1951, when "Go! Go! Go!" reached #10 on the R&B chart, but several of their other records including "It Rocks! It Rolls! It Swings!" (1952) and "Rockin' Is Our Bizness" (1953) "anticipated some crucial elements of rock n roll with their solid, thumping beats, their squealing sax solos." In the 1950s, they moved closer towards an R&B influenced sound, but were unable to weather the influx of rock and roll. Nonetheless, the group was considered a strong influence on bands such as their contemporaries Bill Haley and His Comets, and they were one of the first to record Haley's "Rock-a-Beatin' Boogie". Claude Trenier would later claim in an interview in Blue Suede News magazine that his group was responsible for Haley deciding to record rock and roll; this account is disputed.

One of the first times rock and roll appeared on national television was in May 1954 when the Treniers appeared on the Colgate Comedy Hour, hosted by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. During the playing of their songs, Martin and Lewis participated in the antics, and when the drummer got up and stepped aside, Jerry Lewis sat down and played drums for one song.

The group appeared in several films in the 1950s including The Girl Can't Help It and Don't Knock the Rock (which also featured Haley), and continued to perform as recently as 2003.

In 1955, the group released the song "Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song)" about Giants center fielder, Willie Mays, which included some dialogue by the Hall-of-Famer himself. The song is included on the soundtrack to Ken Burns 1994 documentary Baseball.

In 2013, surviving member Milt Trenier performed semi-weekly at Chicago area restaurants. Milt retired from performing in 2017, after 70 years (1947-2017).

Saxophonist Don Hill died on June 18, 2021, aged 99.

Film appearances

 * Don't Knock the Rock (1956)
 * The Girl Can't Help It (1956)
 * Calypso Heat Wave (1957)
 * Juke Box Rhythm (1959)

title: The Treniers


text:
Sarah Vaughan

Sarah Lois Vaughan (, March 27, 1924 – April 3, 1990) was an American jazz singer and pianist. Nicknamed "Sassy" and "The Divine One", she won two Grammy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, and was nominated for a total of nine Grammy Awards. She was given an NEA Jazz Masters Award in 1989. Critic Scott Yanow wrote that she had "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century".

Early life
Vaughan was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Asbury "Jake" Vaughan, a carpenter by trade who played guitar and piano, and Ada Vaughan, a laundress who sang in the church choir, migrants from Virginia. The Vaughans lived in a house on Brunswick Street in Newark for Vaughan's entire childhood. Jake was deeply religious. The family was active in New Mount Zion Baptist Church at 186 Thomas Street. Vaughan began piano lessons at the age of seven, sang in the church choir, and played piano for rehearsals and services. Sarah and her family were all registered Democrats.

She developed an early love for popular music. In the 1930s, she frequently saw local and touring bands at the Montgomery Street Skating Rink. By her mid-teens, she ventured illegally into Newark's night clubs and performed as a pianist and singer at the Piccadilly Club and at Newark Airport.

Vaughan attended East Side High School, then transferred to Newark Arts High School, which opened in 1931. As her nocturnal adventures as a performer overtook her academic pursuits, she dropped out of high school during her junior year to concentrate more fully on her music.

1942–1943: Early career
Vaughan was frequently accompanied by a friend, Doris Robinson, on her trips into New York City. In the fall of 1942, by which time she was 18 years old, Vaughan suggested that Robinson enter the Apollo Theater Amateur Night contest. Vaughan played piano accompaniment for Robinson, who won second prize. Vaughan later decided to go back and compete as a singer herself. She sang "Body and Soul" and won—although the date of this victorious performance is uncertain. The prize, as Vaughan recalled to Marian McPartland, was $10 and the promise of a week's engagement at the Apollo. On November 20, 1942, she returned to the Apollo to open for Ella Fitzgerald.

During her week of performances at the Apollo, Vaughan was introduced to bandleader and pianist Earl Hines, although the details of that introduction are disputed. Billy Eckstine, Hines' singer at the time, has been credited by Vaughan and others with hearing her at the Apollo and recommending her to Hines. Hines claimed later to have discovered her himself and offered her a job on the spot. After a brief tryout at the Apollo, Hines replaced his female singer with Vaughan on April 4, 1943.

1943–1944: Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine
Vaughan spent the remainder of 1943 and part of 1944 touring the country with the Earl Hines big band, which featured Billy Eckstine. She was hired as a pianist so Hines could hire her under the jurisdiction of the musicians' union (American Federation of Musicians) rather than the singers union (American Guild of Variety Artists). But after Cliff Smalls joined the band as a trombonist and pianist, her duties were limited to singing. The Earl Hines band in this period is remembered as an incubator of bebop, as it included trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, saxophonist Charlie Parker (playing tenor saxophone rather than alto), and trombonist Bennie Green. Gillespie arranged for the band, although the contemporary recording ban by the musicians' union meant that no commercial recordings exist.

Eckstine quit the Hines band in late 1943 and formed a big band with Gillespie, leaving Hines to become the band's musical director. Parker joined Eckstine, and over the next few years the band included Gene Ammons, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Dexter Gordon, and Lucky Thompson. Vaughan accepted Eckstine's invitation to join his band in 1944, giving her the opportunity to record for the first time on December 5, 1944, on the song "I'll Wait and Pray" for De Luxe. Critic and producer Leonard Feather asked her to record later that month for Continental with a septet that included Dizzy Gillespie and Georgie Auld. She left the Eckstine band in late 1944 to pursue a solo career, although she remained close to Eckstine and recorded with him frequently.

Pianist John Malachi is credited with giving Vaughan the moniker "Sassy", a nickname that matched her personality. She liked it, and the name and its shortened variant "Sass" stuck with colleagues and the press. In written communications, Vaughan often spelled it "Sassie".

1945–1948: Early solo career
Vaughan began her solo career in 1945 by freelancing on 52nd Street in New York City at the Three Deuces, the Famous Door, the Downbeat, and the Onyx Club. She spent time at Braddock Grill next to the Apollo Theater in Harlem. On May 11, 1945, she recorded "Lover Man" for Guild with a quintet featuring Gillespie and Parker with Al Haig on piano, Curly Russell on double bass, and Sid Catlett on drums. Later that month, she went into the studio with a slightly different and larger Gillespie/Parker aggregation and recorded three more sides.

After being invited by violinist Stuff Smith to record the song "Time and Again" in October 1945, Vaughan was offered a contract to record for Musicraft by owner Albert Marx, although she would not begin recording as a leader for Musicraft until May 7, 1946. In the intervening time, she recorded for Crown and Gotham and began performing regularly at Café Society Downtown, an integrated club in New York's Sheridan Square.

While at Café Society, Vaughan became friends with trumpeter George Treadwell, who became her manager. She delegated to him most of the musical director responsibilities for her recording sessions, allowing her to concentrate on singing. Over the next few years, Treadwell made changes in Vaughan's stage appearance. Aside from a new wardrobe and hair style, she had her teeth capped, eliminating a gap between her two front teeth.

Her recordings for Musicraft included "If You Could See Me Now" (written and arranged by Tadd Dameron), "Don't Blame Me", "I've Got a Crush on You", "Everything I Have Is Yours" and "Body and Soul". With Vaughan and Treadwell's professional relationship on solid footing, the couple married on September 16, 1946.

In 1947, Vaughan performed at the third Cavalcade of Jazz concert held at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles which was produced by Leon Hefflin, Sr. on September 7, 1947. The Valdez Orchestra, The Blenders, T-Bone Walker, Slim Gaillard, The Honeydrippers, Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, Woody Herman, and the Three Blazers also performed that same day.

Vaughan's recording success for Musicraft continued through 1947 and 1948. Her recording of "Tenderly"—she was proud to be the first to have recorded that jazz standard —became an unexpected pop hit in late 1947. Her December 27, 1947, recording of "It's Magic" (from the Doris Day film Romance on the High Seas) found chart success in early 1948. Her recording of "Nature Boy" from April 8, 1948, became a hit around the time the popular Nat King Cole version was released. Because of a second recording ban by the musicians' union, "Nature Boy" was recorded with an a cappella choir.

1948–1953: Stardom and the Columbia years
The musicians' union ban pushed Musicraft to the brink of bankruptcy. Vaughan used the missed royalty payments as an opportunity to sign with the larger Columbia record label. After the settling of legal issues, her chart successes continued with "Black Coffee" in the summer of 1949. While at Columbia through 1953, she was steered almost exclusively to commercial pop ballads, several with success on the charts: "That Lucky Old Sun", "Make Believe (You Are Glad When You're Sorry)", "I'm Crazy to Love You", "Our Very Own", "I Love the Guy", "Thinking of You" (with pianist Bud Powell), "I Cried for You", "These Things I Offer You", "Vanity", "I Ran All the Way Home", "Saint or Sinner", "My Tormented Heart", and "Time".

She won Esquire magazine's New Star Award for 1947, awards from Down Beat magazine from 1947 to 1952, and from Metronome magazine from 1948 to 1953. Recording and critical success led to performing opportunities, with Vaughan singing to large crowds in clubs around the country during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the summer of 1949, she made her first appearance with a symphony orchestra in a benefit for the Philadelphia Orchestra entitled "100 Men and a Girl." Around this time, Chicago disk jockey Dave Garroway coined a second nickname for her, "The Divine One", that would follow her throughout her career. One of her early television appearances was on DuMont's variety show Stars on Parade (1953–54) in which she sang "My Funny Valentine" and "Linger Awhile".

In 1949, with their finances improving, Vaughan and Treadwell bought a three-story house on 21 Avon Avenue in Newark, occupying the top floor during their increasingly rare off-hours at home and moving Vaughan's parents to the lower two floors. However, business pressures and personality conflicts led to a cooling in Treadwell and Vaughan's relationship. Treadwell hired a road manager to handle her touring needs and opened a management office in Manhattan so he could work with other clients.

Vaughan's relationship with Columbia soured as she became dissatisfied with the commercial material and its lackluster financial success. She made some small-group recordings in 1950 with Miles Davis and Bennie Green, but they were atypical of what she recorded for Columbia.

Radio
In 1949, Vaughan had a radio program, Songs by Sarah Vaughan, on WMGM in New York City. The 15-minute shows were broadcast in the evenings on Wednesday through Sunday from The Clique Club, described as "rendezvous of the bebop crowd." She was accompanied by George Shearing on piano, Oscar Pettiford on double bass, and Kenny Clarke on drums.

1954–1959: Mercury years
In 1953, Treadwell negotiated a contract for Vaughan with Mercury in which she would record commercial material for Mercury and jazz-oriented material for its subsidiary, EmArcy. She was paired with producer Bob Shad, and their working relationship yielded commercial and artistic success. Her debut recording session at Mercury took place in February 1954. She remained with Mercury through 1959. After recording for Roulette from 1960 to 1963, she returned to Mercury from 1964 to 1967.

Her commercial success at Mercury began with the 1954 hit "Make Yourself Comfortable", recorded in the fall of 1954, and continued with "How Important Can It Be" (with Count Basie), "Whatever Lola Wants", "The Banana Boat Song", "You Ought to Have a Wife", and "Misty". Her commercial success peaked in 1959 with "Broken Hearted Melody", a song she considered "corny" which nevertheless became her first gold record, and a regular part of her concert repertoire for years to come. Vaughan was reunited with Billy Eckstine for a series of duet recordings in 1957 that yielded the hit "Passing Strangers". Her commercial recordings were handled by a number of arrangers and conductors, primarily Hugo Peretti and Hal Mooney.

The jazz "track" of her recording career proceeded apace, backed either by her working trio or combinations of jazz musicians. One of her favorite albums was a 1954 sextet date that included Clifford Brown.

In the latter half of the 1950s, she followed a schedule of almost non-stop touring. She was featured at the first Newport Jazz Festival in the summer of 1954 and starred in subsequent editions of that festival at Newport and in New York City for the remainder of her life. In the fall of 1954, she performed at Carnegie Hall with the Count Basie Orchestra on a bill that also included Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Lester Young and the Modern Jazz Quartet. That fall, she again toured Europe before embarking on a "Big Show" U.S. tour, a succession of performances that included Count Basie, George Shearing, Erroll Garner and Jimmy Rushing. At the 1955 New York Jazz Festival on Randalls Island, Vaughan shared the bill with the Dave Brubeck quartet, Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, and the Johnny Richards Orchestra.

Although the professional relationship between Vaughan and Treadwell was quite successful through the 1950s, their personal relationship finally reached a breaking point and she filed for a divorce in 1958. Vaughan had entirely delegated financial matters to Treadwell, and despite significant income figures reported through the 1950s, at the settlement Treadwell said that only $16,000 remained. The couple evenly divided the amount and their personal assets, terminating their business relationship.

She made her UK debut in 1958 at Sunday Night at the London Palladium with several songs including "Who's Got the Last Laugh Now".

1959–1969: Atkins and Roulette
The exit of Treadwell from Vaughan's life was precipitated by the entry of Clyde "C.B." Atkins, a man of uncertain background whom she had met in Chicago and married on September 4, 1958. Although Atkins had no experience in artist management or music, Vaughan wished to have a mixed professional and personal relationship like the one she had with Treadwell. She made Atkins her manager, although she was still feeling the sting of the problems she had with Treadwell and initially kept a closer eye on Atkins. Vaughan and Atkins moved into a house in Englewood, New Jersey.

When Vaughan's contract with Mercury ended in late 1959, she signed on with Roulette, a small label owned by Morris Levy, who was one of the backers of Birdland, where she frequently appeared. She began recording for Roulette in April 1960, making a string of large ensemble albums arranged or conducted by Billy May, Jimmy Jones, Joe Reisman, Quincy Jones, Benny Carter, Lalo Schifrin, and Gerald Wilson. She had pop chart success in 1960 with "Serenata" on Roulette and "Eternally" and "You're My Baby", a couple of residual tracks from her Mercury contract. She recorded After Hours (1961) with guitarist Mundell Lowe and double bassist George Duvivier and Sarah + 2 (1962) with guitarist Barney Kessel and double bassist Joe Comfort.

In 1961 Vaughan and Atkins adopted a daughter, Deborah Lois Atkins, known professionally as Paris Vaughan. However, the relationship with Atkins proved difficult and violent. After several incidents, she filed for divorce in November 1963. She turned to two friends to help sort out the financial affairs of the marriage. Club owner John "Preacher" Wells, a childhood acquaintance, and Clyde "Pumpkin" Golden Jr. discovered that Atkins' gambling and spending had put Vaughan around $150,000 in debt. The Englewood house was seized by the IRS for nonpayment of taxes. Vaughan retained custody of their child and Golden took Atkins' place as Vaughan's manager and lover for the remainder of the decade.

When her contract with Roulette ended in 1963, Vaughan returned to the more familiar confines of Mercury. In the summer of 1963, she went to Denmark with producer Quincy Jones to record Sassy Swings the Tivoli, an album of live performances with her trio. During the next year, she made her first appearance at the White House for President Lyndon Johnson and danced with the president afterward. The Tivoli recording would be the brightest moment of her second stint with Mercury. Changing demographics and tastes in the 1960s left jazz musicians with shrinking audiences and inappropriate material. Although she retained a following large and loyal enough to maintain her career, the quality and quantity of her recorded output dwindled as her voice darkened and her skill remained undiminished. At the conclusion of her Mercury deal in 1967, she lacked a recording contract for the remainder of the decade.

1970–1982: Fisher and Mainstream

In 1971, at the Tropicana in Las Vegas, Marshall Fisher was a concession stand employee and fan when he was introduced to Sarah Vaughan. They were attracted to each other immediately. Fisher moved in with her in Los Angeles. Although he was white and seven years older, he got along with her friends and family. Although he had no experience in the music business, he became her road manager, then personal manager. But unlike other men and managers, Fisher was devoted to her and meticulously managed her career and treated her well. He wrote love poems to her.

In 1971, Bob Shad, who had worked with her as a producer at Mercury, asked her to record for his label, Mainstream, which he had founded after leaving Mercury. Breaking a four-year hiatus, Vaughan signed a contract with Mainstream and returned to the studio for A Time in My Life, a step away from jazz into pop music with songs by Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Marvin Gaye arranged by Ernie Wilkins. She didn't complain about this eclectic change in direction, but she chose the material for her next album after admiring the work of Michel Legrand. He conducted an orchestra of over one hundred musicians for Sarah Vaughan with Michel Legrand, an album of compositions by Legrand with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. The songs brought some of the musicians to tears during the sessions. But Shad wanted a hit, and the album yielded none. She sang a version of the pop hit "Rainy Days and Mondays" by the Carpenters for Feelin' Good. This was followed by Live in Japan, her first live album since 1963. Sarah Vaughan and the Jimmy Rowles Quintet (1974) was more experimental, containing free improvisation and some unconventional scatting.

Send in the Clowns was another attempt to increase sales by breaking into the pop music market. Vaughan disliked the songs and hated the album cover depicting a clown with an afro. She filed a lawsuit against Shad in 1975 on the belief that the cover was inconsistent with the formal, sophisticated image she projected on stage. She also contended that the album Sarah Vaughan: Live at the Holiday Inn Lesotho had an incorrect title and that Shad had been harming her career. Although she disliked the album, she liked the song "Send in the Clowns" written by Stephen Sondheim for the musical A Little Night Music. She learned it on piano, made many changes with the help of pianist Carl Schroeder, and it became her signature song. In 1974, she performed music by George Gershwin at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The orchestra was conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, who was a fan of Vaughan and invited her to perform. Thomas and Vaughan repeated the performance with Thomas' home orchestra in Buffalo, New York, followed by appearances in 1975 and 1976 with other symphony orchestras in the United States.

After leaving Mainstream, she signed with Atlantic and worked on an album of songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney that were arranged by Marty Paich and his son, David Paich of the rock band Toto. She was enthusiastic to be more involved in the making of an album, but Atlantic rejected it on the claim that it contained no hits. "I don't know how they can recognize hits in advance", she said. Atlantic canceled her contract. She said, "I don't give a damn about record companies any more".

Rio and Norman Granz
In 1977, filmmaker Thomas Guy followed Vaughan on tour to film the documentary Listen to the Sun. She traveled throughout South America: Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru. She was enamored of Brazil, as this was her third tour of Brazil in six years. In the documentary, she called the city of Rio "the greatest place I think I've ever been on earth". Audiences were so enthusiastic that she said, "I don't believe they like me that much." After rejection by Atlantic, she wanted to try producing her own album of Brazilian music. She asked Aloísio de Oliveira to run the sessions and recorded I Love Brazil! with Milton Nascimento, Jose Roberto Bertrami, Dorival Caymmi, and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

She had an album but no label to release it, so she signed to Pablo run by Norman Granz. She had known Granz since 1948 when she performed on one of his Jazz at the Philharmonic tours. He was the record producer and manager for Ella Fitzgerald and the owner of Verve. After selling Verve, he started Pablo. He was dedicated to acoustic, mainstream jazz and had recorded Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Clark Terry. In 1978 he recorded Vaughan's How Long Has This Been Going On?, a set of jazz standards with veteran jazz musicians Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, and Louis Bellson. The album was nominated for a Grammy Award. Pablo released I Love Brazil! and it, too, was nominated for a Grammy.

1982–1989: Late career

In the summer of 1980, she received a plaque on 52nd Street outside the CBS Building (Black Rock) commemorating the jazz clubs she had once frequented on "Swing Street" and which had long since been replaced with office buildings. A performance of her symphonic Gershwin program with the New Jersey Symphony in 1980 was broadcast on PBS and won her an Emmy Award the next year for Individual Achievement, Special Class. She was reunited in 1982 with Tilson Thomas for a modified version of the Gershwin program, played again by the Los Angeles Philharmonic but this time in its home hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; the CBS recording of the concert Gershwin Live! won a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female.

After the end of her contract with Pablo in 1982, she committed to a limited number of studio recordings. She made a guest appearance in 1984 on Barry Manilow's 2:00 AM Paradise Cafe, an album of pastiche compositions with established jazz musicians. In 1984, she participated in The Planet is Alive, Let It Live a symphonic piece composed by Tito Fontana and Sante Palumbo on Italian translations of Polish poems by Karol Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II. The recording was made in Germany with an English translation by writer Gene Lees and was released by Lees on his private label after the recording was rejected by the major labels.

In 1985 Vaughan reconnected with her longstanding, continually growing European audience during a celebratory concert at the Chatelet Theater in Paris. Released posthumously on the Justin Time label, In the City of Lights is a two-disc recording of the concert, which covers the highlights of Vaughan's career while capturing a beloved singer at the height of her powers. Thanks in part to the hard-swinging telepathic support of pianist Frank Collett (who answers each of her challenges then coaxes the same from her), Sarah reprises Tad Dameron's "If You Could See Me Now" with uncommon power, her breathstream effecting a seamless connection between chorus and bridge. For the Gershwin Medley, drummer Harold Jones swaps his brushes for sticks to match energy and forcefulness that does not let up until the last of many encores. On June 16, 1985, Vaughan appeared at the Playboy Jazz Festival.

In 1986, Vaughan sang "Happy Talk" and "Bali Ha'i" in the role of Bloody Mary on a studio recording by Kiri Te Kanawa and José Carreras of the score of the Broadway musical South Pacific, while sitting on the studio floor. Vaughan's final album was Brazilian Romance, produced by Sérgio Mendes with songs by Milton Nascimento and Dori Caymmi. It was recorded primarily in the early part of 1987 in New York and Detroit. In 1988, she contributed vocals to an album of Christmas carols recorded by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with the Utah Symphony Orchestra and sold in Hallmark Cards stores. In 1989, Quincy Jones' album Back on the Block included Vaughan in a brief scatting duet with Ella Fitzgerald. This was her final studio recording. It was her only studio recording with Fitzgerald in a career that had begun 46 years earlier opening for Fitzgerald at the Apollo.

The video Sarah Vaughan Live from Monterey was taped in 1983 or 1984 with her trio and guest soloists. Sass and Brass was taped in 1986 in New Orleans with guests Dizzy Gillespie and Maynard Ferguson. Sarah Vaughan: The Divine One was part of the American Masters series on PBS. Also in 1986, on Independence Day in a program nationally televised on PBS she performed with the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, in a medley of songs composed by George Gershwin.

Death
In 1989, Vaughan's health began to decline, although she rarely revealed any hints of this in her performances. She canceled a series of engagements in Europe in 1989, citing the need to seek treatment for arthritis of the hand, although she was able to complete a series of performances in Japan. During a run at New York's Blue Note Jazz Club in 1989, she was diagnosed with lung cancer and was too ill to finish the last day of what would turn out to be her final series of public performances.

Vaughan returned to her home in California to begin chemotherapy and spent her final months alternating stays in the hospital and at home. She grew weary of the struggle and demanded to be taken home, where at the age of 66 she died on the evening of April 3, 1990, while watching Laker Girls, a television movie featuring her daughter.

Her funeral was held at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey. Following the ceremony, a horse-drawn carriage transported her body to Glendale Cemetery, Bloomfield.

Vocal commentary
Parallels have been drawn between Vaughan's voice and those of opera singers. Jazz singer Betty Carter said that with training Vaughan could have "gone as far as Leontyne Price." Bob James, Vaughan's musical director in the 1960s said that "the instrument was there. But the knowledge, the legitimacy of that whole world were not for her ... But if the aria were in Sarah's range she could bring something to it that a classically trained singer could not."

In a chapter devoted to Vaughan in his book Visions of Jazz (2000), critic Gary Giddins described her as the "ageless voice of modern jazz – of giddy postwar virtuosity, biting wit and fearless caprice". He concluded by saying that "No matter how closely we dissect the particulars of her talent ... we must inevitably end up contemplating in silent awe the most phenomenal of her attributes, the one she was handed at birth, the voice that happens once in a lifetime, perhaps once in several lifetimes."

Her obituary in The New York Times described her as a "singer who brought an operatic splendor to her performances of popular standards and jazz." Jazz singer Mel Tormé said that she had "the single best vocal instrument of any singer working in the popular field." Her ability was envied by Frank Sinatra who said, "Sassy is so good now that when I listen to her I want to cut my wrists with a dull razor." New York Times critic John S. Wilson said in 1957 that she possessed "what may well be the finest voice ever applied to jazz." It was close to its peak until shortly before her death at the age of 66. Late in life, she retained a "youthful suppleness and remarkably luscious timbre" and was capable of the projection of coloratura passages described as "delicate and ringingly high".

Vaughan had a large vocal range of soprano through a female baritone, exceptional body, volume, a variety of vocal textures, and superb and highly personal vocal control. Her ear and sense of pitch were almost perfect, and there were no difficult intervals.

In her later years, her voice was described as a "burnished contralto" and as her voice deepened with age her lower register was described as having "shades from a gruff baritone into a rich, juicy contralto". Her use of her contralto register was likened to "dipping into a deep, mysterious well to scoop up a trove of buried riches." Musicologist Henry Pleasants noted, "Vaughan who sings easily down to a contralto low D, ascends to a pure and accurate [soprano] high C."

Vaughan's vibrato was described as "an ornament of uniquely flexible size, shape and duration," as well as "voluptuous" and "heavy." Vaughan was accomplished in her ability to "fray" or "bend" notes at the extremities of her vocal range. It was noted in a 1972 performance of Lionel Bart's "Where Is Love?" that "In mid-tune she began twisting the song, swinging from the incredible cello tones of her bottom register, skyrocketing to the wispy pianissimos of her top."

She held a microphone in live performance, using its placement as part of her performance. Her placings of the microphone allowed her to complement her volume and vocal texture, often holding the microphone at arm's length and moving it to alter her volume.

She frequently used the song "Send in the Clowns" to demonstrate her vocal abilities in live performance. The performance was called a "three-octave tour de force of semi-improvisational pyrotechnics in which the jazz, pop and operatic sides of her musical personality came together and found complete expression" by The New York Times.

Singers influenced by Vaughan include Phoebe Snow, Anita Baker, Sade, and Rickie Lee Jones. Singers Carmen McRae and Dianne Reeves both recorded tribute albums to Vaughan following her death; Sarah: Dedicated to You (1991) and The Calling: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan (2001) respectively.

Though usually considered a jazz singer, Vaughan avoided classifying herself as one. She discussed the term in a 1982 interview for Down Beat:

I don't know why people call me a jazz singer, though I guess people associate me with jazz because I was raised in it, from way back. I'm not putting jazz down, but I'm not a jazz singer ... I've recorded all kinds of music, but (to them) I'm either a jazz singer or a blues singer. I can't sing a blues – just a right-out blues – but I can put the blues in whatever I sing. I might sing 'Send In the Clowns' and I might stick a little bluesy part in it, or any song. What I want to do, music-wise, is all kinds of music that I like, and I like all kinds of music.

Personal life
Vaughan was married three times: to George Treadwell (1946–1958), to Clyde Atkins (1958–1961), and to Waymon Reed (1978–1981). Unable to bear children of her own, Vaughan adopted a baby girl (Debra Lois) in 1961. Debra worked in the 1980s and 1990s as an actress under the name Paris Vaughan. As a result of her daughter's marriage, Vaughan was the mother-in-law of former NHL star Russ Courtnall.

In 1977, Vaughan ended her personal and professional relationship with Marshall Fisher. Although Fisher is occasionally referenced as Vaughan's third husband, they were never legally married. Vaughan began a relationship with Waymon Reed, a trumpet player 16 years her junior who was playing with the Count Basie band. Reed joined her working trio as a musical director and trumpet player and became her third husband in 1978.

She was a member of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority.

Awards and honors
The album Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown and the single "If You Could See Me Now" were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, an award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five years old and have "qualitative or historical significance." In 1985 she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 1988 she was inducted into the American Jazz Hall of Fame.

In 1978, she was given an Honorary Doctorate of Music by Berklee College of Music. Howard University presented Vaughan with an Honorary Doctorate of Music in 1982. https://secretary.howard.edu/resources/sarah-lois-vaughan

In 2012, she was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. In 2004–2006, New Jersey Transit paid tribute to Vaughan in the design of its Newark Light Rail stations. Passengers stopping at any station on this line can read the lyrics to "Body and Soul" along the edge of the station platform.

She was given the George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement at the UCLA Spring Sing.

In 2003, San Francisco and Berkeley, California, made by proclamations March 27 Sarah Lois Vaughan Day.

Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition
The James Moody Jazz Festival hosts an annual jazz vocalist competition named for Vaughan. The Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition is also known as the SASSY Awards for Vaughan's nickname.

In popular culture
Sarah Vaughan was portrayed by Pamela McPherson-Cornelius in season two, episode six of HBO's The Deuce (TV series).

Discography
Studio albums

 * Sarah Vaughan (with George Treadwell and his All Stars) (1950)
 * Sarah Vaughan (with Clifford Brown) (1955)
 * In the Land of Hi-Fi (1955)
 * Sassy (1956)
 * Swingin' Easy (1957)
 * Sarah Vaughan in a Romantic Mood (1957)
 * Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine Sing the Best of Irving Berlin (with Billy Eckstine) (1957)
 * Sarah Vaughan Sings Broadway: Great Songs from Hit Shows (1958)
 * Sarah Vaughan Sings George Gershwin (with Hal Mooney & His Orchestra) (1958)
 * No Count Sarah (with Count Basie Orchestra) (1959)
 * Vaughan and Violins (1959)
 * The Magic of Sarah Vaughan (1959)
 * Close to You (1960)
 * Dreamy (1960)
 * The Divine One (1960)
 * My Heart Sings (1961)
 * Count Basie/Sarah Vaughan (with Count Base Orchestra) (1961)
 * After Hours (1961)
 * You're Mine You (1962)
 * Sarah + 2 (1962)
 * Snowbound (1962)
 * Sarah Sings Soulfully (1963)
 * The Explosive Side of Sarah Vaughan (1963)
 * Sarah Slightly Classical (1963)
 * Star Eyes (1963)
 * The Lonely Hours (1964)
 * Vaughan with Voices (1964)
 * Sweet 'n' Sassy (1964)
 * ¡Viva! Vaughan (1965)
 * Sarah Vaughan Sings the Mancini Songbook (1965)
 * Pop Artistry of Sarah Vaughan (1966)
 * The New Scene (1966)
 * It's a Man's World (1967)
 * Sassy Swings Again (1967)
 * A Time in My Life (1971)
 * Sarah Vaughan with Michel Legrand (with Michel Legrand) (1972)
 * Feelin' Good (1972)
 * Send in the Clowns (1974)
 * I Love Brazil! (1977)
 * How Long Has This Been Going On? (1978)
 * The Duke Ellington Songbook, Vol. 1 (1979)
 * The Duke Ellington Songbook, Vol. 2 (1979)
 * Copacabana (1979)
 * Songs of the Beatles (1981)
 * Send in the Clowns (with Count Basie Orchestra) (1981)
 * Crazy and Mixed Up (1982)
 * The Planet Is Alive...Let It Live! (1984)
 * Brazilian Romance (1987)

Filmography

 * Disc Jockey (1951)
 * Murder, Inc. (1960)
 * Schlager-Raketen (1960)

title: Sarah Vaughan