Teddi King

Despite the many striking elements of Teddi King's professional path, attention inevitably gravitates toward the singular aura attached to her inaugural stage appearance as a melodic mermaid within a Peter Pan production. Following her high school diploma, she launched her performing activities through Boston's Tributary Theatre. Victory in a vocal contest sponsored by Dinah Shore placed her in a traveling revue tasked with entertaining troops during the years separating World War II from the Korean conflict. In that interval the vocalist applied herself rigorously to classical vocal discipline alongside jazz piano study. Engagements with assorted ensembles followed, the first of which yielded a recording debut facilitated by Nat Pierce on the Motif label. From the summer of 1952 onward she toured and waxed sides with pianist George Shearing, complementing his exacting precision with a command of pitch that exceeded ordinary pop standards.

She sustained a singing livelihood across several decades, periodically reuniting with Shearing for further road work. Solo projects, both concert and studio, appeared on RCA, Victor, and Coral. The 1959 album All the King's Songs carried a dual significance, offering her readings of material identified with a dozen prominent male vocalists, among them Nat King Cole. Jazz commentators frequently distanced her from the idiom, only to reconsider after she succumbed to lupus several years short of her fiftieth birthday. Memorial benefit concerts supporting lupus research have since been staged in her honor, routinely presenting rising female vocalists.