Joyce Bryant, who has died aged 95, was a sultry, four-octave jazz singer known as “the Bronze Blonde Bombshell”, “the Black Marilyn Monroe” and “the Belter”; but in the mid-1950s, sorely disillusioned, she walked away from show business and enrolled at college.
She was banned from radio in her early years for being too provocative. “I simply had oomph,” she insisted. She certainly had “oomph” when headlining at night spots in Hollywood, Las Vegas and New York with her silver curls and her shimmering “mermaid” gowns (more than once she had to be carried on and off stage since she was unable to walk unaided, so tight were they).
But, like Marilyn Monroe, she suffered from addiction to pills and had a long line of failed relationships. During the early 1950s she earned thousands of dollars a night, drove a sports car, and wore $700 sequined gowns, dyed furs and fabulous jewels. But she was mostly unhappy onstage, and by 1955 her career was all but over. Owing $60,000 to the taxman, she found solace in religion.
She was born Ione Emily Bryant into a strict Seventh Day Adventist family in Oakland, California, on October 14 1927, one of eight children, and brought up across the bay in San Francisco. Her drunkard father, Whitfield Bryant, was a railway chef who was only home long enough to get his long-suffering wife Constance (née Withers) pregnant.
Though she wanted to become a science teacher, the 14-year-old Joyce eloped with a much older man. The marriage ended on the wedding night when her mother marched in on them. With the marriage annulled, Joyce was dispatched to a cousin in Los Angeles.
Her vocal talents were already apparent and her relatives were supportive, inviting neighbours to see her sing. Then in 1946, when a cousin dragged her along to an impromptu sing-along at a local bar, Joyce stood out and was paid $25 to go up on stage.
From there she secured spots in clubs, and worked the “borscht circuit” in the Catskills, where she developed a large and loyal Jewish following. She was soon performing in her signature low-cut mermaid dresses (which were mostly made for her by the African-American designer Zelda Wynn Valdes); managers at the venues had to enlist the services of bouncers and burly barmen to keep the male clientele at bay.
Her gowns were so tight, she recalled, that a quick escape from an amorous male admirer was near-impossible – “And many tried their luck with me,” she recalled. “One time I was beaten so bad by a customer who wanted a piece of me that I didn’t think I would perform again.” As for her gowns, she declared, “I was the Lady Gaga of my time!”
One night, sharing a bill with Josephine Baker and not wanting be overshadowed, she used radiator paint to dye her hair silver, and stuck with the look until 1954, when she felt she no longer needed a gimmick.
Despite her burgeoning fame she endured foul treatment. There was violence when she toured the southern states, and the Ku Klux Klan burnt an effigy of her.
In 1952, when she played the Aladdin Room at the Hotel Algiers in Miami, she was banned by the management from staying the night there or even being photographed outside it. They also told her to tone down her sultry, seductive act, but she went ahead as normal. For her first show, the front of the stage was ringed with mainly female customers; when she did the second show, she recalled, it was all men.
She urged her fellow African-American entertainers to fight the Jim Crow laws, and was named by Ebony magazine as one of the five most beautiful black women in the world (in front of Hilda Simms and Eartha Kitt and behind Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne). Songs like Drunk with Love and Love for Sale were hugely popular in her live sets but were banned by many radio stations as being too salacious.
In 1953, Life magazine ran a provocative six-page spread of her, and Joyce Bryant was welcomed into the Hollywood jet set, photographed on the town with the likes of Sammy Davis Jnr, Frank Sinatra and Harry Belafonte. The producer Pat DiCicco arranged for her to be given a long-term contract at Hollywood’s celebrated Mocambo club: “She’s as explosive as a stick of dynamite, and built like it with a tousled fuse,” ran her description in the club’s flyers.
Her hits included It’s Only Human, Go Where You Go, A Shoulder to Weep On, and her own favourite, Farewell to Arms. But the people around her left her disenchanted with the entertainment industry. “I had a very bad throat, and I was doing eight performances a day,” she recalled. “A doctor was brought in to help, saying: ‘I can spray your throat with cocaine, and that will fix the problem, but you’ll become addicted.’ Then I overheard my manager say: ‘I don’t care what you do, just make her sing!’” She also became dependent on the prescription drugs she used to help her sleep.
In February 1955 she made her debut at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, but by the end of the year – drug-addicted, traumatised, her hair and scalp damaged – she had left her life in the fast lane behind, enrolling at a Seventh Day Adventist College in Alabama; her powerful voice was put to good use as an evangelist.
She became an active member of the civil rights movement, organising fundraisers for black people to buy food, clothing and medicine, and gave concerts – wearing her natural black hair and no make-up – to raise money for her church. Martin Luther King was a fan, and they became good friends, but when she asked her church to stand against discrimination, she was told, she recalled: “These are of earthly matters and thus of no spiritual importance.”
Disillusioned, in the mid-1960s she returned to performing. She reinvented herself, training with a vocal teacher and singing for New York City Opera, as well as in Europe. In the 1980s she performed in jazz clubs and worked as a voice coach for the likes of Raquel Welch and Jennifer Holliday.
In hindsight, Joyce Bryant admitted to never having liked her look, or having to perform on the Sabbath: “The audience of gangsters and their molls were more interested in what I would give out – and the gals in what I was wearing – than by my performance.”
Joyce Bryant, born October 14 1927, died November 20 2022
