NEWPORT NEWS, Va. – To call Pearl Bailey just an entertainer would be a disservice to her legacy. The multi-talented singer, actress and jazz icon broke multiple barriers, becoming a Tony award-winning artist and delegate to the United Nations.
Bailey was born in Newport News on March 29, 1918, almost a year after the birth of another jazz icon in the same city, Ella Fitzgerald.
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It didn’t take Bailey long to find her passion for performing. She began singing at the age of three with the choir at her father’s church in Newport News. Bailey had no formal training or music education and credited her success and love of music and performing to her early experience at the church.
When Pearl was just 4 years old, her parents divorced, and she had to split time between her father’s home in D.C. and her mother’s in Philadelphia.
It was in Philadelphia where Bailey got her first taste of stardom at 15 when she won an amateur talent contest during her “Stage Debut” in 1933, winning a prize of $5.
But Bailey had her eyes set on a much bigger prize. She dropped out of high school to pursue a career in the vaudeville circuit. Vaudeville in the 1930s was typically characterized as a form of entertainment where various unrelated acts would come together to make a show. These shows sometimes involved singers, jugglers and even live animals.
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It would be almost a decade before Bailey got her big break in 1944 when she was booked as a solo performer at a popular club in New York.
After her monumental breakthrough, her stardom was on the rise, and it could not be contained. Bailey began headlining for bands led by some of the biggest stars of the time, such as Cootie Williams and Duke Ellington.
In 1946, she made her Broadway debut, and in 1947, she pursued a recording career where she made multiple hit songs.
Over the years, Bailey would bounce around from medium to medium, proving that there was no limit to her skill and craft. Bailey appeared in TV shows and plays at home and abroad and starred in multiple movies.
Bailey’s achievements were not just limited to the arts, however. In 1970, then President Richard Nixon named Bailey the “Ambassador of Love” and served as a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan, Ford and Bush administrations. She was praised for her humanitarian efforts.
In 1985, at the age of 67, Bailey obtained a degree in theology from Georgetown University, completing a life goal she had never forgotten about over the years: pursuing a degree in higher education.
In 1988, just two years before her death, Bailey received the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a civilian when Ronald Reagan awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“She has dazzled audiences all over the world. She has also served the nation as a Special Adviser to the United States Mission to the United Nations. And America loves Pearl Bailey, for her songs and for her soul,” Reagan said.
Bailey died in 1990 at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia at the age of 72, after a career that spanned decades. Over those decades of entertaining Americans, she received many accolades, including a Tony Award and Daytime Emmy and was the first Black person ever to win a SAG Lifetime Achievement Award.
The little girl who sang her way from a small church in Newport News to Broadway will have her legacy forever memorialized through her TV appearances, movies, plays and music.