Susannah McCorkle, Pop and Jazz Singer, Is Dead at 55

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Susannah McCorkle, the sultry voiced pop-jazz singer who brought a
rare literary refinement to popular standards, was found dead
outside her apartment at 41 West 86th Street early yesterday
morning. She was 55.

 She had apparently jumped to her death, the police said. She had
left a suicide note, but the police would not reveal its contents.
In her apartment, the singer had left a will, along with detailed
instructions about disposition of her estate.

 With a smoky, often kittenish pop- jazz voice and phrasing that
lingered stealthily behind the beat, Ms. McCorkle was a direct
stylistic descendant of Billie Holiday, who was her primary
influence. A student of lyrics and a prolific writer herself, she
liked to find new ways of interpreting familiar standards. Her
pensive, slowed-up rendition of "There's No Business Like Show
Business," for instance, found an underlying sadness in Irving
Berlin's razzle-dazzle anthem. She also had special and continuing
love for Brazilian pop, to which she devoted an album, "Sabia"
(Concord Jazz), whose lyrics included her own translations from
Portuguese. Many of her later albums included at least one standard
composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim.

 With a repertory of more than 3,000 songs and with 17 albums to
her credit, Ms. McCorkle was more than a nightclub singer. She was
a passionate, intrepid scholar of 20th century pop. And her cabaret
shows, which she wrote herself, featured rich anecdotal histories
of the songwriters whose work she performed. Her honors included
three Album of the Year awards from Stereo Review.

 As a prose writer, Ms. McCorkle published fiction in Mademoiselle,
Cosmopolitan and "The O. Henry Book of Prize Short Stories," and
nonfiction in The New York Times Magazine and American Heritage.
Her lengthy pieces for American Heritage included extended
appreciations of Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith and Irving Berlin.

 Born in Berkeley, Calif., on Jan. 4, 1946, Ms. McCorkle had a
peripatetic childhood because her father, an anthropologist, took
teaching positions at colleges around the country. Eventually she
enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where she
majored in Italian literature. It was the era of the free speech
movement, and Ms. McCorkle, disillusioned with American politics,
dropped out of college and traveled to Europe to study languages
and to begin a literary career. It was while living in Paris that
she discovered American jazz, when a friend played her a recording
of Billie Holiday singing "I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues."

 "That one record completely revised my thinking and made me want
to become a professional singer," she recalled years later. In 1972
she moved to London, where she began singing with a band led by the
trumpeter John Chilton. Before long, she was eking out a living
singing in pubs throughout London.

 Jazz singing gave her a sense of belonging. "Before that, I had
always been solitary and introverted," she said. "As a singer, I
began meeting other people who were solitary and introverted but
who were also great jazz musicians. It was like finding my tribe."

 Returning to the United States in the late 1970's, Ms. McCorkle
had her American breakthrough with a seven-month engagement at the
Cookery, in Greenwich Village. Two albums that she had recorded in
London were re-released in America. Championed by a coterie of
music critics and disc jockeys, Ms. McCorkle built a modest but
solid career, recording several more albums for small labels and
eventually landing on Concord Jazz, for which she recorded steadily
over the next decade.

 Ms. McCorkle became a regular fixture at New York's leading
cabarets, especially at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel. Her
Concord Jazz albums included records devoted to the songs of Cole
Porter, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. But her wide-ranging
taste in songs embraced not only the great craftsmen of the
pre-rock era but contemporary writers like Paul Simon, Rupert
Holmes and Alan and Marilyn Bergman.

 Her 1999 album, "From Broken Hearts to Blue Skies," which became the 
basis of one of her finest cabaret shows, was an alternately witty 
and wistful sequence of songs (by everyone from
Billy Strayhorn to Dave Frishberg to Irving Berlin) describing the
romantic mood swings of a single woman in New York City. She had
completed a new album, "Most Requested Songs," that was scheduled for
release in August.

 In recent years, Ms. McCorkle developed interactive music
workshops for children ages 5 to 18, which she gave at Lincoln
Center, Borders bookstores and in public schools in New York, New
Jersey and Florida.

 She is survived by her mother, Margery McCorkle, of Oakland,
Calif.; and two sisters, Margery Pinson, of Texas, and Kate
McCorkle, of Santa Monica, Calif.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company