SARAH VAUGHAN
Her parents, Asbury Jake Vaughan and wife Ada, had settled in Newark, New Jersey several years before Sarah's birth in 1924. They owned a piano and their daughter gravitated toward it. Though never formally trained, she studied music and learned to sing on her own (self-teaching a talent in itself), a challenge taken seriously for several years leading up to age 18; at that point any reasonable degree of discipline didn't seem necessary. The family attended the Mount Zion Baptist Church, where she sang in the choir and later played organ. The first time Sarah sang somewhere outside the Lord's house, it was at the Apollo in Harlem, competing in the theater's famous amateur contest in October 1942 and taking first place, which included ... MORE ››
