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Dolores Parker (25 October 1919 – 17 December 2018) was an American jazz singer.[4]

Career

Dolores Parker was born on 25 October 1919[4] in Illinois[2] or in New Orleans, Louisiana,[3] and started her singing career after winning an amateur contest in Chicago.[2]

She performed with the orchestras under the direction of Earl Hines, Duke Ellington,[2] and Benny Carter[5] and appeared in a number of movies, which included House of Strangers.[2]

With Duke Ellington, she notably recorded the song “Take Love Easy“.[6] “Miss Parker sings [both songs] engagingly,” wrote The New Yorker in 1949 reviewing that single (Columbia 38519, coupled with “I Could Get a Man”).[7]

She was a protege of boxer Joe Louis who signed her to a “personal management contract” in 1952. Louis was credited for “boost[ing] [her] singing career” and was quoted to say: “She is the greatest singer since the sewing machine“.[8][9][10][11]

In 1955, she starred in a “revitalized edition” of the Broadway musical titled Sugar Hill.[11]

Later she married a surgeon named E. Gates Morgan from Akron, Ohio,[12][3] and in 1959 was claimed to be the “first Negro performer on Akron TV“, being a regular on the television station’s five-nights-a-week variety show Akron Today.[12]

She recorded with Herbie Mann for Atlantic, together with Maya Angelou being credited for vocals on his 1960 album The Common Ground.[13]

According to her Apple Music profile, in 1993 she was honored by the Smithsonian Museum as one of the “five surviving vocalists of the Duke Ellington Orchestra” and later recorded, as a featured soloist on a Duke Ellington medley, with the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra for their 1999 album titled Traditions.[4]

Parker died on 17 December 2018, aged 99.[14]

References

  1. ^ “Dolores Parker”. Discogs.
  2. ^ a b c d e “Jet”. Johnson Publishing Company. 13 November 1952.
  3. ^ a b c Who’s who Among Black Americans. Who’s who among Black Americans, Incorporated, Publishing Company. 1994. ISBN 978-0-8103-5461-6.
  4. ^ a b c Eugene Cgadbourne. “Dolores Parker”. Apple Music.
  5. ^ “Motion Picture Herald”. 1950.
  6. ^ “Billboard”. 9 July 1949.
  7. ^ Ross, Harold Wallace; Shawn, William; Brown, Tina; Remnick, David; White, Katharine Sergeant Angell; Irvin, Rea; Angell, Roger (1949). “The New Yorker”.
  8. ^ “Jet”. Johnson Publishing Company. 3 July 1952.
  9. ^ “Jet”. Johnson Publishing Company. 17 December 1953.
  10. ^ “Jet”. Johnson Publishing Company. 30 April 1981.
  11. ^ a b “Jet”. Johnson Publishing Company. 3 February 1955.
  12. ^ a b “Jet”. Johnson Publishing Company. 14 May 1959.
  13. ^ “Reviews”. Metronome. 1961.
  14. ^ Joe Bebco: “Dolores Parker, Big Band Vocalist Dies at 99”. syncopatedtimes.com, 13 January 2019. Retrieved 24 April 2026.