Joyce Bryant

Joyce Bryant
Carl Van Vechten photo portrait of Joyce Bryant, May 28, 1953
Background information
Born	(1928-10-14)October 14, 1928 Oakland, California, U.S.
Genres	traditional pop, vocal jazz, gospel, opera
Occupation(s)	Singer, actress, recording artist, dancer, civil rights activist
Instruments	Vocals
Years active	1946–1955; 1960s–-1990s
Labels	Okeh, Epic

Joyce Bryant (born October 14, 1928) is an African-American singer and actress who achieved fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a theater and nightclub performer. With her signature silver hair and tight mermaid dresses, she became an early African-American sex symbol, garnering such nicknames as "The Bronze Blond Bombshell", "the black Marilyn Monroe", "The Belter", and "The Voice You'll Always Remember".

Bryant left the industry in 1955 at the height of her popularity to devote herself to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. A decade later, she returned to show business as a trained classical vocalist and later became a vocal coach.

Joyce Bryant, the oldest of eight children, was born in Oakland, California, and raised in San Francisco. Her father worked as a chef for the Southern Pacific Railroad and her mother was a devout Seventh-day Adventist. Bryant, a quiet child raised in a strict home, had ambitions of becoming a sociology teacher. She eloped at the age of 14 but the marriage ended that same evening. In 1946, while visiting cousins in Los Angeles, she agreed on a dare to participate in an impromptu singalong at a local club. "After a while," Bryant recounted in a 1955 Jet interview, "I found I was the only one singing. A few minutes later the club owner offered me $25 to go up on stage, and I took it because I [needed the money] to get home."

During the late 1940s, Bryant had slowly acquired a series of regular gigs, from a $400-per-week engagement at New York's La Martinique nightclub to a 118-show tour of the Catskill Mountains hotel circuit. Her reputation and profile eventually grew to the level that one night, she appeared on the same bill as Josephine Baker. Not wanting to be upstaged, Bryant colored her hair silver using radiator paint, and performed wearing a tight silver dress and silver floor-length mink. Bryant recalled when she arrived onstage, "I stopped everything!" Bryant's silver hair and tight, backless, cleavage-revealing mermaid dresses became her trademark look and, combined with her four octave voice, further elevated her status into one of the major headlining stars of the early 1950s, by which time she became known by such nicknames as "The Bronze Blond Bombshell", "the black Marilyn Monroe", "The Belter", and "The Voice You'll Always Remember".Etta James noted in her 2003 autobiography, Rage to Survive: The Etta James Story: "I didn't want to look innocent. I wanted to look like Joyce Bryant. [...] I dug her. I thought Joyce was gutsy and I copied her style–brazen and independent."