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Barbara Lea

Barbara Lea was born Barbara Ann Le Cocq in Detroit, Michigan, on April 10, 1929. Her family moved to the suburb of Melvindale in 1932. Times were bleak in the 1930s and she had her first job at the age of 7 delivering newspapers. She also took piano and tap dancing lessons. She went to public schools in Melvindale and in Detroit when the family moved back in 1940, and then later attended high school at Kingswood School Cranbrook.

Barbara's whole family was musical and there were always pianos and ukuleles in the house, which everyone took turns playing. Her father had been a clarinetist; her brother played trumpet and harmonica. The family entertainment was gathering around the piano and singing while her mother played. By the age of 6 or 7, she had decided on a career as a singer.

When she was 16, her family bought a summer cottage in Belle River, Ontario. A dance band played outdoors every Friday and Saturday night and, trembling with stage fright, Barbara sat in with them for the last few weeks of the summer. The next winter the band got a Saturday night gig at a nightclub in Windsor, Ontario, and asked her to join them as their vocalist. She was delighted to be paid $5 a night.

At Wellesley College, Barbara majored in Music Theory, her sights set firmly on singing but with no idea how this might happen. Fortunately for her, a friend had a date whose roommate, Bill Dunham, played piano in a Harvard dixieland band called the Crimson Stompers. She became their vocalist. She also had the pleasure of working with Vic Dickenson, Marian McPartland, Edmond Hall, Frankie Newton, Johnny Windhurst and George Wein. After college, Barbara remained in Boston for a year, singing with the same sort of society bands she had worked with in Detroit. She was very popular for her musicianship; she knew and sang every tune they played, saying simply "Put it in E flat" or "Put it in G". Because of this ability, she was paid $10 a night, rather than the standard $5.

In 1952, Barbara moved to New York armed with a demo tape and an introduction to a very good independent agent. A family friend, Graham Prince, who was a musician and arranger, wrote a few arrangements for her and got her a gig at a club -- she describes it as a dive -- in Union City, NJ. After several weeks, exhausted and discouraged, she left the club and New York, hot-footing it back to Boston and immediately began working in clubs and finally got steady work seven nights a week in various cocktail lounges, where there would be a trio working behind the bar. She tried twice to move back to New York, but the places where she found work were all "joints", and she returned to Boston. One advantage to Boston was that she found a little second-hand bookstore behind Symphony Hall which had a couple of 3-foot-high stacks of sheet music selling for a nickel each; she combed these looking for show tunes. It was a wonderful time for adding to her already considerable repertoire.

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Album Review

Barbara Lea: Black Butterfly

Read "Black Butterfly" reviewed by Tom Pierce


Vocalist Barbara Lea has enjoyed a substantial and respected career presenting lesser-known gems from the complementary and overlapping worlds of the Great American Songbook and jazz. More knowledgeable observers than the general music public, which to this day generally remains sadly unaware of her talents, anticipated this success by choosing her as Best New Singer in the 1956 Down Beat international critics poll.

Black Butterfly, a new recording, pairs her with saxophonist Loren Schoenberg's orchestra, with which she has worked ...

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"Twenty years ago a very promising young singer named Barbara Lea, who reminded some listeners of Lee Wiley, was beginning to make an impression on records and in clubs such as the Village Vanguard. But suddenly nothing more was heard of her-- because, it now turns out, she began studying acting to improve her presence as a singer and, through this, went into the theatre. Two decades have changed Miss Lea from a demure, sweet-faced college girl fresh out of Wellesley to a mature, assured, strong-featured woman. And her voice has grown to match her appearance. There are still echoes of Lee Wiley when Miss Lea sings, but her voice has acquired a depth, a deep velvet sound in her chest tones that carries smoothly into the upper register, enabling her to color her songs with exquisite shading and dynamics. Along with this, she has a jazz singer's ability to lift a dull song, to kick it into life after she has given it the obligatory straight first chorus. She almost invariably succeeds but her full qualities-- her easy range, her polish, her sensitive phrasing, the power she can call on-- flow brilliantly. There are some things that have to wait for their proper time. Miss Lea's singing seems to be such a thing and the time, finally, is now. She has become the exemplification of what most singers hope they will sound like but rarely do." --John S. Wilson, New York Times, August 16, 1975

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Do You Know What It...

Audiophile Records
2007

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Black Butterfly

Self Produced
2006

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Hoagy's Children -...

Polygram Distribution
1983

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Barbara Lea With The...

Polygram Distribution
1956

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