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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Joya Sherrill

July 9, 2010 by Doug Ramsey

Joya Sherrill, the singer who died in late June at the age of 85, joined Duke Ellington andThumbnail image for Sherrill.jpg his Orchestra in 1942 following her high school graduation. One of her features through the mid-forties was the Billy Strayhorn-Rex Stewart collaboration “Kissing Bug.” The song received a good deal of radio air play and in its V-disc version became a favorite of the troops as World War Two wound down. Here is the V-disc performance, followed by a brief take on Ellington’s “Carnegie Blues.” Ben Webster’s successor in the band, Al Sears, is the tenor saxophone soloist.

Ms. Sherrill worked off and on with Ellington for most of her performing life. She was with the Benny Goodman band that toured the Soviet Union in 1962. In the 1970s, she hosted the childrens program Time For Joya on one of my alma maters, WPIX-TV in New York City.

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Comments

  1. Ian Carey says

    July 9, 2010 at 6:10 pm

    One of my all-time favorite singers, Ellingtonian or otherwise!

  2. Mike says

    September 22, 2010 at 9:23 pm

    You can view an episode of “Time For Joya” at the following link:
    http://www.tvparty.com/lostny2joya2.html

  3. nicoledenise says

    November 23, 2010 at 3:54 pm

    its no surprise that miss joya is gone to the pearly gates,and she usually bring the duke to her children’s show-joyas fun school. for years going back and forth to goldsboro,nc to new york,i cant get enough of her smooth velvet voice. at first i didnt know she sung with duke ellington. one wrote on youtube knew mr. b.b. who done the luther comic strip was last seen in londonm. im a singer,human rights advocate and entertainer. but its not so wiseful to lost a talent we knew her from jazz 798’s to tv. she was strfuly magnificent. i give my all to her brave courage to set her show for children over the middkle east in 1982. you are my favourite jazz chantuse and you always be rembered with a show many children like me to live with. i wish you are my mom. and you are the second black singer to do a children’s showe. i love my grandmother so much we talked a lot also-i missed her last year. thanks mama joya for the songs youn sang for us. goooodbye,sorry to leave, now it is time to say-good-bye. rip mama sherill.

    Uhh….

  4. Mark says

    December 25, 2010 at 6:25 pm

    Was listening to the Duke Ellington CD “Falling in Love with Duke” and was captured by the voice of the lady singing the song “All of a Sudden My Heart Sings” Wow! The linernotes identified her as Joya Sherrill, and a quick Google revealed she passed away earlier this year. Belated thoughts of comfort to her family and friends

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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