Maxine Sullivan
b. Marietta Williams, 13 May 1911, Homestead, Pennsylvania, USA, d. 7 April 1987. Sullivan began singing in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before travelling to New York in 1937. She joined the Claude Thornhill band and made a hugely successful record of Loch Lomond. The popularity of this recording led to her making several more jazzed-up folk songs, including Annie Laurie, which, for all their frequent banality, she sang with effortless charm. In the late '30s and early '40s she made several feature films and also worked and recorded with her husband John Kirby. After a brief retirement she began appearing again in New York and also travelled to Europe. In the mid-50s she quit singing to take up nursing but returned in 1958. In addition to singing she also played fluegelhorn, valve-trombone and pocket trumpet. She continued to work through the '60s, often with Cliff Jackson, who had become her second husband, and with Bob Wilber. Her career blossomed in the late '70s and throughout most of the '80s, thanks to performances with the World's Greatest Jazz Band and Scott Hamilton. In her later years she devoted some of her considerable energy to running the ‘House that Jazz Built’, a museum she created at her home and dedicated to Jackson's memory. The hallmarks of her singing were charm and delicacy, qualities which were often out of favour and probably accounted for the ups and downs of her career. Her later work, especially the recordings with Wilber, proved that her talent was far greater than public taste had allowed.