Carrie Smith obit

Carrie Smith, Singer in ‘Black and Blue’ on Broadway, Dies at 86

 

Carrie Smith, a jazz and blues singer who achieved stage fame as one of the stars of the Broadway musical revue Black and Blue, died on May 20 at the Lillian Booth Actors Home of the Actors Fund in Englewood, N.J. She was 86. The cause was cancer.

She was not on the list.

Ms. Smith had been a presence in the jazz scene for three decades when in 1989 she was cast as one of the singers in the bluesy revue Black and Blue, a show that featured music by such 1920s and '30s blues and jazz titans as Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. She sang the standards "Big Butter and Egg Man," "Am I Blue" and "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues." The show ran for 829 performances. Carrie Louise Smith was born in Fort Gaines, GA, on Aug. 25, 1925. She started her career as a gospel singer, appearing at music festivals like the Newport Jazz Festival and Great Harvest Baptist Church in Newark. In 1961 she gave a solo concert at Town Hall in Manhattan. In the 1960s Ms. Smith sang with the pianist Big Tiny Little's band and a sextet led by the trombonist Tyree Glenn. By the next decade, she had developed a solo career, though she gained more renown in Europe than she did in United States.

Her albums included "Confessin' the Blues," "Do Your Duty," "Nobody Wants You," "When You're Down and Out," "Carrie Smith" and "I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues."

Smith was born in Fort Gaines, Georgia, United States. She was a member of a church choir that performed at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival. In the early 1960's, Smith appeared on TV Gospel Time, a show designed to appeal to black audiences. She first won notice singing with Big Tiny Little in the early 1970s, but became internationally known in 1974 when she played Bessie Smith (to whom she is of no relation) in Dick Hyman's Satchmo Remembered at Carnegie Hall. Smith then launched a solo career, performing with the New York Jazz Repertory Orchestra, Tyree Glenn (1973), Yank Lawson (1987), and the World's Greatest Jazz Band, in addition to recording numerous solo albums. She starred in the Broadway musical Black and Blue from 1989 to 1991. The liner notes to the CD reissue of Only You Can Do It, featured laudatory remarks from jazz critics Rex Reed, Leonard Feather, Richard Sudhalter, and John S. Wilson. The album, produced by Ben Arrigo for GPRT Records, featured the compositions of Gladys Shelley.

Ms. Smith has no immediate survivors.