Myra Taylor

Myra Taylor was an American jazz singer and songwriter. She began performing as a teenager and continued performing into her nineties. Myra Jardine Taylor was born in Bonner Springs, Kansas, but her family moved to Kansas City, Missouri's historic 18th and Vine area when she was a child. Working as a housekeeper at age 14, she began dancing at the Sunset and Reno clubs on 12th street. Being underage, she entered some clubs by sneaking in through a rear window and eventually attracted attention singing. In the 1930s, she toured the Midwest with Clarence Love's band. She moved to Chicago in 1937 and worked with Warren “Baby” Dodds, Lonnie Johnson, Roy Eldridge and Lil Hardin Armstrong. She returned to Kansas City in 1940 and Harlan Leonard hired Myra Taylor as the featured singer for his new band Harlan Leonard and His Rockets. The band had a lengthy engagement at Harlem's Golden Gate Ballroom. The band recorded I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire on RCA's Bluebird Records label. Myra Taylor wrote the song Dig It, and Leonard claimed co-writing credit, later omitting her name and denying her royalties. Myra Taylor and Leonard parted company, and she join Eubie Blake's band for a USO tour, then returned to Kansas City to sing with Jimmy Keith. In 1946, she had a hit with Spider and the Fly on Mercury Records. Frustrated at the American music business, she spent most of the 1950s in Juarez, Mexico. She began touring in Europe, and moved to Frankfurt, Germany and opened her own club in 1971 named "Down by the Riverside" with Carlo Bohlander, headling with her group The Jetset, with Anita Honis, Dee McNeil and Margo St John. She later toured with DeeDee McNeail as "The Big Spenders". Myra performed in USO shows during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, performing in 32 different countries. In 1977, she moved back to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, California to work in film and television, and in 1994 relocated back to her native Kansas City. In 2000, she recorded My Night to Dream for Analogue Production Originals records and released it on the very inauspicious date of September 11, 2001. It was re-released on SACD in 2010. Myra Taylor continued singing, performing with the group Wild Women of Kansas City and celebrated her 94th birthday with a concert at Knuckleheads Saloon with Samantha Fish and Mike Zito.

Myra Taylor's final performance was July 24, 2011 with the Wild Women of Kansas City at Jardine's nightclub in Kansas City. Myra Taylor appeared as the character Pearl in three episodes of the US television program The Jeffersons - The Arrival (Part 1) and The Arrival (Part 2) in 1980 and Men of the Cloth in 1982. She was the lead in the 1979 women's professional basketball comedy Scoring, as well as supporting roles in the Cher thriller Suspect, Crossing Delancey, director Lasse Hallström's Once Around with Richard Dryfuss and Ron Howard's The Paper. Myra Taylor died on December 9th, 2011.