Joyce Bryant obituary (2024)

With her metallic silver hair and hourglass figure sheathed in a skin-tight gown, Joyce Bryant was described as “the black Marilyn Monroe”.

In an era when black performers were still excluded from many of America’s nightclubs, her determination to ignore the colour bar took courage. When she became the first black singer to perform in one of the hotels on Miami Beach, she defied death threats from the Ku Klux Klan, who burnt her effigy.

Named by Ebony magazine as one of the five most beautiful black women in the world, she was also one of the first to be fêted as a sex symbol in the mainstream and predominantly white media. “The bronze blonde bombshell” Time called her when Bryant was featured on the magazine’s cover after her triumphant appearance at Manhattan’s prestigious Copacabana nightclub in 1953. Only a few years earlier Harry Belafonte had been being refused entry under the venue’s “no blacks” policy.

“In a profession that specialises in novelty, Negro chanteuse Joyce Bryant looks startlingly different,” the magazine declared in the language of the time. “Her poodle-cut hair is dazzling silver, her inch-long fingernails are stained to match. Her dress is a backless, spangled sheath, and as she sings every inch of her lean body writhes feverishly.”

The signature hair colour was achieved with radiator paint and was first applied when she shared a bill with Josephine Baker. The paint was not great for her hair but Bryant was determined not to be upstaged and it worked wonders for her career. The dresses were designed by the African-American designer Zelda Wynn Valdes, who went on to create the first Playboy “Bunny” costume.

When Bryant sang, she would wander into the audience, sit on laps and playfully bite the ear lobes of some of the gentlemen. Back on stage she slashed and punched the air with her arms so vigorously that it was said she lost a couple of pounds with every performance.

It was this as much as her almost four-octave range that earned another of her nicknames, “Belter Bryant”, as if she were a prize fighter. In a way she was. She spoke out fearlessly against racial inequality and the Jim Crow laws of the Deep South and supported and befriended Martin Luther King.

By the mid-1950s she was earning up to $3,500 per night ($36,000 today). The director Otto Preminger wanted her to play opposite Belafonte in the title role in his all-black 1954 film adaptation of Carmen Jones, but her diary was full. It took two performers to replace her, with Dorothy Dandridge appearing as Carmen on screen and Marilyn Horne overdubbing the singing parts.

Yet, unknown to her public, off stage she was struggling not only against discrimination but with censorship, exploitation, drug addiction and religious guilt.

Her intense, near-operatic delivery of torch songs such as Love for Sale and Drunk With Love thrilled nightclub audiences but were banned from radio for being too suggestive. “Most of my records are banned,” she said with a bewildered air. “Not dirty. Just banned.” The racketeers who frequented the clubs in which she worked pestered her — her refusal to be a “gangster’s moll” led to at least one beating at the hands of a spurned predator.

When she was unable to perform because of a bad throat, a doctor was brought in and told her, “I can spray your throat with cocaine and that will fix the problem, but you’ll become addicted.” She then heard her manager tell him: “I don’t care what you do, just make her sing.”

She might have put up with all of these indignities but for her religious faith and her upbringing as a Seventh Day Adventist. “Religion has always been a part of me and it was a very sinful thing I was doing — being very sexy, with tight, low-cut gowns,” she said.

At the end of 1955 she walked away from stardom and enrolled at a religious college, prompting a story in Ebony headlined “Former Café Singer Gives Up $200,000-a-year Career to Learn to Serve God”.

She continued to perform, without the silver hair and revealing dresses, to raise money for the church. She railed at the segregation that still scarred the south and was shocked when she came across a hospital that refused black patients, although to her frustration she was unable to persuade the Seventh Day Adventists to support the civil rights struggle.

Born Ione Emily Bryant in 1927 in Oakland, California, she was the third of eight children to Dorothy (née Withers) and Whitfield Bryant, a chef for the Southern Pacific Railroad. Growing up in San Francisco in a strict religious household, she hoped to become a teacher before she eloped at the age of 14. Her “husband” disappeared after their first night and she never remarried.

She had no musical training but at the age of 19 while visiting cousins in Los Angeles agreed on a dare to join a singalong at a local club. “After a while I found I was the only one singing and the club owner offered me $25 to go up on stage,” she recalled. She had stopped in LA on her way to enrol in Bible studies at the Adventists’ Oakwood College in Alabama, but her singing career took over and it was to be another decade before she finally did so.

By the 1960s she had been all but forgotten as a wave of new black female singers from Aretha Franklin to Nina Simone took over. Yet she reinvented herself, training as an opera singer and winning a contract with the New York City Opera. In the 1980s she returned to performing jazz on cruise ships and became a voice coach whose clients included Phyllis Hyman and Raquel Welch.

In retirement she was looked after by her niece Robyn LaBeaud and might once again have lapsed into obscurity had not Jim Byers, a music writer with The Washington Post, stumbled on a cache of 1950s articles about “the black Marilyn Monroe”. Fascinated by her story, he spent six months tracking her down and embarked on making a documentary, Joyce Bryant: The Lost Diva, which led to renewed interest in her career.

Bryant’s spirit remained indomitable. Shortly before her 95th birthday, she posted on her official Instagram account: “Don’t count me out!”

Joyce Bryant, singer, was born on October 14, 1927. She died on November 20, 2022, aged 95