Joyce Bryant (October 14, 1927 – November 20, 2022) was an American singer, dancer, and civil rights activist 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.
Emily Ione Bryant, the third of eight children, was born in Oakland, California, and known from her early childhood as Joyce. She was raised in San Francisco. Bryant 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 City'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".
Beginning in 1952, Bryant released a series of records for Okeh, including "A Shoulder to Weep On", "After You've Gone", and "Farewell to Love". Two of her most well-known standards, "Love for Sale" and "Drunk with Love", were banned from radio play for their provocative lyrics. Upon the release of "Runnin' Wild" two years later, Jet noted that the song was Bryant's "first to be passed by CBS and NBC radio censors, who banned three previous recordings for being too sexy." Bryant remarked in 1980, "what an irony that my biggest hit record was 'Love for Sale'. Banned in Boston it was, and later...just about everywhere else." Bryant, who often faced discrimination and was outspoken on issues of racial inequality, became in 1952 the first black entertainer to perform at a Miami Beach hotel, defying threats by the Ku Klux Klan who had burned her in effigy.
Bryant was critical of racial billing practices at night clubs and hotels and advocated for entertainers as a group to fight Jim Crow laws. In 1954, she became one of the first black singers to perform at the Casino Royal in Washington, D.C., where she said that she had heard so much about the segregation practiced there that she was surprised to see so many African-Americans attend the downtown club. "It was a great thrill," she said, "to see them enter and be treated so courteously by the management." Bryant, along with Lena Horne, Hilda Simms, Eartha Kitt, and Dorothy Dandridge were named in an issue of Ebony as five most beautiful black women in the world.
Bryant earned up to $3500 a performance in the early 1950s, but she had grown weary of the industry. The silver paint had damaged her hair, she did not enjoy working on the Sabbath, and she felt uneasy with her image. Further, Bryant hated the men, often gangsters, who frequented the clubs in which she worked. She was once beaten in her dressing room after rejecting a man's advances. Her disenchantment with the drug and gangster subcultures, combined with pressures from her management, led Bryant to quit performing late in 1955.
Devoting herself to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Bryant enrolled in Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama. Traveling for years through the South, Bryant grew angry when she saw hospitals refuse care for those in critical need because they were black. As a result, she organized fundraisers for blacks to buy food, clothing, and medicine, and she continued to put on concerts (wearing her natural black hair and no makeup) to raise money for her church.
Disillusioned, Bryant returned to entertaining in the 1960s and trained with vocal teacher Frederick Wilkerson at Howard University, which led to her winning a contract with the New York City Opera. She also toured internationally with the Italian, French, and Vienna Opera companies. She returned to performing jazz in the 1980s and began a career as a vocal instructor, with such clients as Jennifer Holliday, Phyllis Hyman, and Raquel Welch.
In the early 1990s Ms.
Bryant, who was living in New York at the time, was walking near Lincoln Center
on a sidewalk that was being repaired. She took a fall and was injured,
breaking a knee and chipping some teeth after which she moved back to California and faded into
relative obscurity. She died of complications from Alzheimer's disease in Los
Angeles on November 20, 2022, at the age of 95. (Edited from Wikipedia &
New York Times)