Abbey Lincoln, 1930–2010

Abbey Lincoln began her career as a glamour girl but ended up as a revered elder of jazz, renowned for artistic integrity and daring. In her film debut, the 1956 comedy The Girl Can’t Help It, Lincoln sang while dressed in a gown previously worn by Marilyn Monroe. But after immersing herself in the civil-rights movement, Lincoln abandoned her kittenish pose, dumping the Monroe dress in an incinerator as an act of liberation.

Born Anna Marie Wooldridge in Chicago, Lincoln was raised in rural Michigan, the 10th of 12 children. In her early 20s, she left for Los Angeles, eventually landing in a Honolulu nightclub where she met Billie Holliday and Louis Armstrong. Returning to Los Angeles, said The New York Times, “she took the name Abbey Lincoln, a symbolic conjoining of Westminster Abbey and Abraham Lincoln.” She made her first album, Affair . . . a Story of a Girl in Love, in 1956, the year of her film debut.

By 1957, Lincoln was working with drummer Max Roach and saxophonist Sonny Rollins, said The Washington Post. “She stopped straightening her hair and in 1959 released one of her most memorable early albums, Abbey Is Blue.” Then in 1960, she joined Roach, whom she later married, in making We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite. Hailed as “the first outright protest album,” it featured “Roach’s thundering drums and Ms. Lincoln’s occasional shrieks and moans, representing oppression and hardship.” Lincoln’s music career faltered in the 1960s—one critic dismissed her as a “professional Negro.” But she won the title role in For Love of Ivy, with Sidney Poitier, and acted in other films. After she and Roach divorced, in 1970, Lincoln returned to California and cared for her mother.

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In the 1990s, her singing career was revived with a series of powerful recordings that revealed her voice’s mature command, beginning with The World Is Falling Down, with pianist Hank Jones and trumpeter Clark Terry. Lincoln’s songwriting also won acclaim, and in 2003 she won a Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. “Sing a song correctly,” Lincoln said, “and you live forever.”