A Bullet Put Her in a Wheelchair, But Did Nothing to Mute Her Voice

When her accompanist-husband carries singer Wesla Whitfield onto the stage and settles her on a high stool near his piano, the audience wonders why--until her glorious voice erases all other thoughts.

In the past, the 51-year-old Whitfield rarely spoke publicly about her paralysis. But this season, she’s taking her story into theaters, along with her art.

“In April 1977, I was shot by a couple of kids on the street,” she told the audience at the off-Broadway Kaufman Theater, where she spent two weeks in the fall.

The statement relieves spectators while making them want more. They get little. “Nobody wants to be a terrible tragedy,” she says. “I’m doing what I set out to do, somewhat successfully.”

And then she does just that, breaking into a soaring rendition of “Lost in the Stars,” followed by “Pick Yourself Up.”

In an interview in the New York apartment that Whitfield and husband Mike Greensill share, she says more about the incident that happened when she was 29.

“I was coming out of a rehearsal . . . ,” she recalls. “Two little boys came up to me and spoke. ‘You better come with us.’ I turned away but I saw one little boy open his jacket.”

The words that followed will never leave her memory.

“Should I shoot her?” the smaller boy asked.

“Go ahead and shoot her,” the other replied.

The bullet hit her in the spine. “I heard a little popping sound,” she recalls. “I turned and fell down.”

The two boys were never found, and Whitfield was relieved she didn’t have to testify at a trial. “I’m sure my life has been better than theirs,” she says.

She doesn’t say much more, and she agonized over how much to tell her audiences. “I’ve seen those shows where people go on and on about themselves,” she says, “and it is just boring.”

She would rather talk about her music and how she got where she is today.

After attending San Francisco State College, Whitfield sang soprano for four years in the chorus of the San Francisco Opera.

“My heart wasn’t in it,” she says. “They were always referring to ‘the voice.’ I always cared about the song. I found myself creeping off to piano bars. When I had a chance to become a singing cocktail waitress and do these old songs I love, I jumped at it.”

The shooting changed all that, and she left entertainment to retrain as a computer programmer.

“During that first year, I spent a lot of time being depressed,” she says. As she worked to regain her emotional and physical strength she also began singing again, in small clubs.

“Michael came into a club [where] I was singing in 1981,” Whitfield says, looking fondly at her husband. “The piano player invited him to sit in. A big mistake.

“He talked to me about doing some arrangements.”

Arrangements led to gigs; performing together led to marriage.

They now have 500 songs in their repertoire, mainly American, from the 1920s through the ‘50s.

“She’s best at songs of great intelligence, with a sense of irony,” Greensill says. “She’s better at Rodgers and Hart, who are sophisticated and adult, than at Gershwin, who tends to be frothier.”

Whitfield herself says, “I’m a lyric interpreter. I want to tell those stories.”

A New York Times writer said, “Whitfield has one of those cool, artesian voices that seem to emerge with absolute purity and transparency from some underground spring.”

Today, that pure voice can be heard in a variety of venues. In London she sings at Pizza on the Park. She has performed with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and pianist-singer Michael Feinstein on symphonic pops concerts and has given master classes. She likes theaters because, unlike clubs, waiters aren’t making a clatter. “In San Francisco, I’m even part of a concert series at a library,” she says. “It’s a lot of fun--surrounded by books.”

Some jazz fans think she is a cabaret singer because she doesn’t sing scat, while some cabaret fans consider her a jazz singer. Her last three CDs have been increasingly jazzy, Greensill says.

“I love moving myself further and further in that direction,” Whitfield says. “Mike is a jazz musician. I’m still fighting my way out of classical.”

Greensill, who moved to America from England in 1977 and now is a U.S. citizen, says he has found his niche, arranging and performing jazz versions of great popular songs. “I found my calling with Wesla,” he says. “The light bulb went on; it’s what I want to do with my life. I like arranging; I can put clever twists on tunes.”

He adds with a smile: “She lets me out now and then to play with other musicians.”

Whitfield sometimes performs on her own too; she recently did a musical at San Francisco City College, playing Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” using a wheelchair.

“I don’t pursue theater,” she says. “But I still have this lifelong desire to play Marian the librarian in ‘The Music Man.’ I think that’s much more suitable to me than Mama Rose. That’s my real voice.”