Sheila Guyse / Joya Sherrill - This Is Sheila / Sugar & Spice (2020)

This is Sheila
In the 1940s and 1950s, Sheila Guyse (1925-2013) was a popular, well-loved figure both on stage and screen, comparable to such stars as Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne and Ruby Dee, all black actresses who broke through racial barriers. In 1943, at 18, she won first prize at the Apollo amateur contest, and was thoroughly thrilled when informed that she was the latest in a long line of winners that included Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Ruth Brown. She was labeled by New York critics as “Lena Horne’s newest rival.” In 1958, at 30, she recorded her only LP album, "This is Sheila," accompanied by an orchestra conducted by Leroy Holmes. In it, she exhibits the vocal personality of an unfettered singer, managing to impart with conviction and elan a sense of immediacy and vitality to a widely varied repertoire. The band provides some swinging and warmly pulsing support. Jet magazine described her as “a glamorous, high-octane performer under supper club spotlights.”

Sugar & Spice
Joya Sherrill (1924-2010) was seventeen when Duke Ellington hired her as a singer in 1942. The reason, she had written the lyrics for the bandleader’s theme song 'Take the 'A' Train,' in the young girl’s own words, “just for fun.” National acclaim would come to Joya soon thereafter with her 1944 performance of Ellington’s 'I’m Beginning to See the Light.' She left the band in early 1946, but continued to work with Ellington occasionally over the next two decades. “Duke would call me for jobs once a year at least,” she would admit. In 1959, Joya wrote the songs of her first album "Sugar and Spice," mixing the basic concepts of original lullabies with the more adult approach of jazz. Musical accompaniment and arrangements were provided by Luther Henderson, a famed Broadway orchestrator and arranger who had also worked with Ellington. Through her career, she sang in a long list of theaters scattered quite literally from coast to coast, and in 1962 emerged again in a big way when she was chosen to accompany the Benny Goodman Orchestra in a tour of Russia under U.S. Government auspices.