Susannah McCorkle
b. 1 January 1949, Berkeley, California, USA. In the late '60s, McCorkle lived for a while in Paris. It was during this sojourn that she heard Billie Holiday on records and decided to take up singing. Multi-lingual, she lived for a while in Italy, working as a translator and taking any singing jobs she could find. In 1972, she moved to the UK, singing in clubs and pubs and learning about what she had determined would be her future career. She also made two albums which, although well received, enjoyed only limited circulation. In the late '70s, McCorkle returned to the USA and settled in New York, where a five-month engagement at the Cookery in Greenwich Village brought her to wider public attention and elicited rave reviews from critics. She continued to record during the '80s, and her maturing style and the darkening timbre of her voice greatly enhanced her performances. By the early '90s, with the release by Concord Records of NO MORE BLUES and SABIA, two enormously successful albums, McCorkle was poised to make her name known to the wider world. Indeed, her linguistic abilities, skills which enabled her to translate lyrics, notably the Brazilian songs on SABIA, make her a likely candidate for international success. In the meantime, she is consolidating her status in jazz with awards, including the 1989 New York Music Award, and is being recorded by the Smithsonian Institute, the youngest singer ever to be included in their popular music series. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, McCorkle has also had several short stories published and, in 1991, was working on her first novel.