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Maria Cole was born Maria Hawkins on August 1, 1922 in Boston, Massachusetts but grew up in her aunt’s genteel surroundings in North Carolina. Graduating in 1938 from the prestigious Black preparatory, the Palmer Memorial Institute, which was founded by her aunt, Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown. She returned to Boston to attend a clerical college but began working with a jazz orchestra by night and soon dropped out to pursue her love of music in New York.

Once in the city Maria joined Benny Carter’s band, performed with Count Basie and Fletcher Henderson before Ellington heard a recording of her throaty, resonant voice in the mid-1940s and hired her as a vocalist for his Orchestra. By 1946 she was appearing solo at Club Zanzibar in Harlem as an opening act for the Mills Brothers.

In 1943 she married Tuskegee Airman Spurgeon Ellington, who died in a training flight, met Nat King Cole while both performing at the Zanzibar, married him in 1948 and remained united until his death in 1965.

Jazz singer Maria Ellington Cole died in a nursing home in Boca Raton, Florida following a short battle with stomach cancer at the age of 89, on July 10, 2012.

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