Beatrice Abbott was born in 1925 and came from Rhode Island and started singing as a high-school student in Providence. Her good looks and pretty voice soon got her a break in New York at the age of 19, as the featured vocalist of the Boyd Raeburn orchestra for a few weeks in June 1944 after which she then moved on to Henry Jerome’s thirteen piece band. She went on to work with a number of little known dance bands before working the Eastern club circuit, she also worked with her husband Leon Ruby who she married in 1948. He was a well-known trumpeter, and he had his own Dixieland band.
In the early Fifties she settled in Chicago, and sang to lounge audiences for the most part of the following two decades. In the 1950s, Bea sang with the Hal Otis Orchestra, opening a new room at the Sheraton Blackstone Hotel called Cafe Bonaparte. She also performed at the Melody Mill Ballroom in North Riverside. She sang with the Andy Powell Orchestra and the Vic Cesario Trio and performed with pianist Joe Vito and jazz violinist Johnny Frigo.
Bea s only album, The Too, Too Marvelous Bea , was recorded in 1957 by Westminster Records. It includes a collection of rhythm tunes and ballads, which allows her to swing but also to demonstrate her more tender and sensitive side. Her warm and pliant voice was deftly backed by the quintet of violinist Hal Otis, who reinforced the set s general atmosphere of lighthearted swinging, not only responding tastefully to Bea s moody vocals, but also contributing eight instrumental sides from his own Westminster album Out of Nowhere.
Unfortunately during the period of her formative working life there were many singers making it big after the decline of the big band business such as Peggy Lee, Jeri Southern, Ella Fitzgerald etc. so although she possessed a fine voice with a nice intimate delivery the odds were stacked against her.
Bea continued to perform into the 1980s, appearing with the Dixieland Jazz Band in Grant Park as part of the city's free summer entertainment. From 1991 she worked at Oak Bank in Chicago as a secretary to the vice president also caring for her husband who became very ill with Parkinsons disease and died in 1992. She retired in 2006 and died of cancer on Tuesday, March 20, 2007 in Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
(Scant information edited from Fresh Sound Records, Jazz Views & Chicago Tribune. "So Long" mp3 from Internet Archive)
Any more information regarding Bea will be greatly appreciated.