Margie Baker

Jazz singer Margie Baker balanced a part-time musical path for decades against her primary commitments as a full-time employee of the San Francisco school district and as a parent. She entered the world in Center, TX, around 1937. When World War II broke out, she relocated with her mother to San Francisco, where her mother took a wartime position as a riveter in the shipbuilding industry. At age 15 she completed high school and entered the University of California at Berkeley on a scholarship; after two years she moved to San Francisco State University and earned a bachelor’s degree in education. While teaching elementary school she attended night classes to obtain both a master’s degree and, later, a Ph.D. For many years she worked in district administration, rising to Director of Compensatory Education, the post responsible for allocating federal resources to support at-risk students, and she stayed in that role until retirement.

Throughout the same period Baker sustained a separate nocturnal vocation. In the 1950s she accompanied her younger sister-in-law, jazz singer Mary Stallings, to nightclubs, where she met and befriended musicians including Dizzy Gillespie and James Moody. A lifelong admirer of jazz and blues, she launched her own professional singing career in 1973. The Hilton hotel chain became her chief employer, booking her at Henri’s Room inside the San Francisco Hilton for two nights each week during the school year and five nights each week in summer, with additional engagements at Hilton properties elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Once she left her daytime post, she could allocate greater energy to performances. A 2003 concert presented in San Francisco’s Jazz Preservation District was captured and issued locally as her first CD, Live at Rassalas. Two years afterward, at age 68, she issued her first nationally distributed album, Live at Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, on the CAP Records label.