Betty Glamann Voorhees (May 21, 1923 – September 3, 1990) was an American jazz and classical harpist who was born in Wellington, Kansas and began learning harp at the age of ten.
When Betty Glamann was only 13 years old, she was first harpist for a symphony orchestra broadcasting twice weekly on NBC. Her accomplishment of the next few years, were enough to fill out an illustrious career for most musicians. But for Miss Glamann they were merely prelude to the crowning glory, her emergence as one of the world's greatest harpists in the idiom of swing.
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| Smith - Glamann Quintet |
Here's "Bettys Blues" from above album.
Then in another quick reverse, Miss Glamann swung from the delirious plane of Spike Jones to a call from the great lady of theater, Katherine Cornell, to play harp in the Broadway production of Antony and Cleopatra. She followed this with a contract as solo harpist for Jacobowsky and the Colonel starring Tallulah Bankhead.
had begun to bend to jazz, and in her off-hours with other musicians, she applied the idiom to her instrument which previously had been restricted to more angelic sounds. Word began to get around the field about Betty's swinging harp. The late Fred Allen heard one of her remarkable sessions and opened a guest spot for her on a TV show. Garry Moore then did the same and then Steven Allen, always on the search for fresh jazz talent, spotlighted her.
In some of these off-hour sessions with musicians, Miss Glamann began to develop some ideas with Rufus Smith, the respected arranger and jazz bassist, about a quintet build around new sounds of the harp. The group was a sock success on Arthur Godfrey's TV shows. Then in 1955, after the incomparable Duke Ellington heard her, he added a place for the harp in his orchestra for the first time in his 30-year career and appointed Betty Glamann to the enviable place in his orchestra as did Marian McPartland and then Oscar Pettiford in whose band we hear her in 1957 radio broadcasts and his 1958 album “In Hi-Fi Volume Two.”
I cannot find any information about her latter years except that in 1972 Betty played harp on the Johnny Lytle album “People & Love.” And that dear music lovers is where her trail goes cold until the announcement of her death in Stamford, Connecticut, 1990.
(A big thank you to Mark Betcher @ Unearthed In The Atomic Attic for most of the information. Remainder mainly from Wikipedia.)