Music
Barbara Morrison
1949–2022 · jazz and blues singer, educator
Ypsilanti-born, Romulus-raised jazz and blues singer who first sang on Detroit radio at ten and became a mainstay of the Los Angeles jazz scene.
- Born
Ypsilanti, Michigan- Died
Los Angeles, California
aged 72- Detroit years
- 1949–1973
- Field
- Music
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Barbara Morrison was born in Ypsilanti and raised in Romulus, in the western Wayne County suburbs of Detroit, and she made her first radio appearance in Detroit at the age of ten. In 1973, at twenty-three, she moved to Los Angeles and began singing with the blues saxophonist Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, and from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s she recorded several albums with Johnny Otis. Equally at home in blues and jazz, she toured in 1986 with the Philip Morris Superband led by organist Jimmy Smith, with James Moody and Detroit's Kenny Burrell, and later in an all-star Harold Arlen tribute and a televised 1995 salute to Ella Fitzgerald. Over her career she worked with Gerald Wilson, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Ron Carter, Etta James, Nancy Wilson, Tony Bennett and the Count Basie Orchestra, and she sang at Montreux, Carnegie Hall and the Sydney Opera House. She taught global jazz studies at UCLA and founded a performing-arts center in Los Angeles. She died in 2022, aged 72.
Highlights
- First radio appearance in Detroit at age 10
- Sang with Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson and recorded with Johnny Otis
- Toured with the Philip Morris Superband (1986)
- Adjunct professor of global jazz studies at UCLA