Abbey Lincoln

Abbey Lincoln

Person / 1930 - 2010 / United States

jazz vocal jazz

Biography

Anna Marie Wooldridge, known professionally as Abbey Lincoln, was an American jazz vocalist, songwriter, and actress. She was a civil rights activist beginning in the 1960s. Lincoln made a career out of delivering deeply felt presentations of standards, as well as writing and singing her own material.

Source: Wikipedia -- text available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Image via Wikipedia -- Abbey Lincoln.

Elsewhere

Analysed songs (10)

Afro-Blue

Abbey Lincoln

Oscar Brown Jr.'s lyric to Mongo Santamaría's polyrhythmic tune turns a percussion pattern into a vision of ancestral homeland…

ancestral memory and diaspora eroticism as metaphor for connection to homeland Black beauty and self-affirmation

Bird Alone

Abbey Lincoln

A meditation on solitude framed as a bird's flight across a troubled sky, the song uses the image of an unaccompanied bird to…

solitude freedom mourning and resilience

Blue Monk

Abbey Lincoln

Abbey Lincoln sets original lyrics to Thelonious Monk's instrumental theme, turning a jazz standard into a meditation on…

solitude and self-reliance the price of freedom endurance through hardship

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

Abbey Lincoln

Abbey Lincoln's 1991 reading of the Depression-era standard strips the song back to its bare, bitter arithmetic: a man who built…

economic betrayal labor and disposability war and its aftermath

For All We Know

Abbey Lincoln

A standard-era torch song built on a single plea: seize the present because permanence is never guaranteed. Abbey Lincoln's…

carpe diem uncertainty of the future mortality

Long As You're Living

Abbey Lincoln

A direct, sermon-like piece of advice-giving set to jazz phrasing, in which the singer positions herself as a hard-won…

mortality and urgency self-improvement brotherhood and ethics

Nature Boy

Abbey Lincoln

A spoken-of stranger becomes the vehicle for a plainly stated moral about love, delivered as a hushed parable rather than a…

wisdom found outside convention the outsider as sage love as ultimate knowledge

Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise

Abbey Lincoln

Abbey Lincoln takes a standard from the 1928 operetta "New Moon" and turns its sunrise imagery into a meditation on love's…

impermanence of love cyclical time desire and destruction

The Music Is the Magic

Abbey Lincoln

A late-career meditation from Abbey Lincoln that treats music itself as a spiritual refuge rather than a subject to be…

music as sanctuary interiority spirituality

Windmills of Your Mind

Abbey Lincoln

A standard-turned-jazz-vehicle built entirely on circular imagery, this lyric maps the disorienting churn of memory after a…

memory and obsession the end of love time's circularity