Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Marion Montgomery was born Marian Maud Runnells on November 17, 1934 in Natchez, Mississippi. She began her career in Atlanta, Georgia working clubs before moving on to Chicago, Illinois where singer Peggy Lee heard her on an audition tape and suggested she should be signed by Capitol Records. From the early to mid-1960 she released three albums for the label. During this early part of her career, she became Marian Montgomery, having previously gone by the nickname of Pepe, and eventually changing her name to Marion.

In 1965, she came to Britain to play a season with John Dankworth and met and married English pianist and musical director Laurie Holloway, thus beginning a long and productive association in which they both became very well known to British audiences. In the Seventies she became the resident singer on the British chat show hosted by Michael Parkinson.

By the 1980s she collaborated a series of concerts and albums with composer and conductor Richard Rodney Bennett. Her recording of the song Maybe the Morning was used by Radio Luxembourg to close out each evening broadcast, and when the station closed its doors.

Her final studio recording was That Lady from Natchez, released in 1999 and continued to perform including a sold-out three weeks at London’s Pizza on the Park two months before her death. Never categorizing herself purely as a jazz singer, rather simply as a singer of various styles who left the world a catalogue of two-dozen albums, vocalist Marion Montgomery passed away on July 22, 2002 in Bray, Berkshire, England after a ten-year battle with lung cancer.

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