Singer Sarah Vaughan Dies at 66 : Legendary Performer Succumbs to Lung Cancer at Home

Sarah Vaughan, the legendary singer with the remarkable range and smoky contralto voice that earned her the nickname “The Divine One,” has died of lung cancer. She was 66.

Miss Vaughan, who had been released from Cedars-Sinai Hospital earlier Tuesday, died Tuesday night at her home in the exclusive Hidden Hills area of the western San Fernando Valley.

Her 87-year-old mother, Ada, and her adopted daughter, Paris Deborah, were at her side when she died.

Dubbed “Sassy” for her on-stage manner, Miss Vaughan was associated with recordings of such perennial jazz and pop favorites as “Body and Soul,” “It’s Magic,” “Misty,” “I Cover the Waterfront,” “Lover Man,” “Here’s That Rainy Day” and “Send in the Clowns.”

Despite her fight with cancer, Vaughan had hoped to begin working on a new recording this week.

Last Sept. 3, after Mayor Tom Bradley proclaimed “Sarah Vaughan Day in Los Angeles,” she sang with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, delighting 11,878 with the soaring lyric voice that made her so popular for nearly five decades.

“She just kept becoming greater and greater as the years went on,” Times jazz critic Leonard Feather, a longtime friend of Miss Vaughan’s who first announced her death, said today. “In the last few years she was just astonishing. She was the idol and envy of virtually all singers.”

Feather appraised her professional versatility in his “Encyclopedia of Jazz Singers” by saying that she was “capable of incomparable jazz performances yet qualified to be an opera singer.”

That opinion was echoed today by Times music critic Martin Bernheimer, who reviews performances of classical music including opera:

“Sarah Vaughan had a voice of extraordinary sweetness, flexibility and purity, and she used it with uncanny insinuation throughout a wide range. She could have taught many an opera diva lessons in breath control, in legato phrasing and in expressive communication. She was a great singer. Period.”

Miss Vaughan herself had scoffed at attempts to categorize her as a jazz singer.

“I just sing,” she said. “I sing whatever I can.”

Born March 27, 1924, in Newark, N.J., to a carpenter and a laundress, she told an interviewer in her maturity that she had never even seen an opera. Her musical training was in the church choir with her mother, first as a singer and later as organist.

She claimed that she never envisioned getting into show business, even when she signed up for amateur night at New York’s storied Apollo Theater in 1942.

“I just quit in the third year of high school and started singing at amateur hours,” she once told an interviewer. “The night I won at the Apollo I was only doing it for the $10.”

But Billy Eckstine heard her and recommended that band leader Earl Hines hire her. Her career as concert and recording star was launched.

Miss Vaughan had four husbands: trumpeter George Treadwell, former pro football player Clyde Atkins, Las Vegas restaurateur Marshall Fisher and musician Waymon Reed.