Woman with the Sultry Voice...Pearl Bailey

This Broadway musical star was noted for her trademark song delivery in which she interrupted a number to make comic asides to the audience. Bailey began her career performing in amateur shows and as a band singer in vaudeville and cabarets where she was known at first as the younger sister of dancer Bill Bailey. By the mid-1940s, she had evolved her own unique style of delivery--a slyly sultry and husky drawl--and her superb comic timing which she displayed in her hit recording "Tired" and her show-stopping performance in the 1946 Broadway musical "St. Louis Woman".

Pearl Bailey (smoking cigarette) and friends at Bohemian Caverns Club, Washington, DC, circa. 1950's

The following year, Bailey made her film debut in "Variety Girl" (1947), and while her magnetic personality made itself felt in featured "best friend" roles in the lush film musicals "Carmen Jones" (1955) and "Porgy and Bess" (1959) and as an earthy, savvy presence in the melodramas "St Louis Blues" (1958) and "All the Fine Young Cannibals" (1960), it was on the musical and cabaret stage that she was a star. Bailey triumphed on Broadway as a practical-minded madam in the Truman Capote/Harold Arlen collaboration "House of Flowers" (1955) and as the perennial matchmaker Dolly Levi in the all-black production of "Hello, Dolly!" (1967). By the 1970's, Bailey was a familiar presence, chatting on talk shows, posing with innumerable presidents and hosting her own TV series in 1971. Bio courtesy of www.tcm.com (Turner Classic Movies)

Pearl Bailey in her dressing room 1942, Photo: Paul Henderson, Maryland Historical Society