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Susannah McCorkle was born on January 1, 1946 in Berkeley, California and studied modern languages prior to starting her career in singing. She was inspired to begin singing professionally after hearing some Billie Holiday recordings in Paris in the late Sixties, while also holding a position an interpreter at the European Commission in Brussels. But a move to London in 1972 sealed her commitment to pursue her singing career.

While in the UK, she made two albums which, although well received, In the late 1970s, Susannah returned to the United States and settled in New York City, where a five-month engagement at the Cookery in Greenwich Village brought her to wider public attention and elicited rave reviews and critical acclaim.

During the 1980s, McCorkle continued to record, maturing style and darkening the timbre of her voice. This greatly enhanced her performances and by the early 1990s, two of the Concord Record albums she recorded, No More Blues and Sábia, were enormously successful and made her name known to the wider world. She was recorded by the Smithsonian Institution, which at the time made her the youngest singer ever to have been included in its popular music series.

Thanks to her linguistic skills Susannah translated lyrics of Brazilian, French, and Italian songs. As an author she published several short stories as well as fiction in Mademoiselle and Cosmopolitan magazines, and non-fiction in the New York Times Magazine and American Heritage including lengthy articles on Ethel Waters, Irving Berlin Bessie Smith and Mae West.

Though a survivor of breast cancer, vocalist Susannah McCorkle suffered for many years from depression until finally committing suicide on May 19, 2001 at age 55. She leapt off the balcony of her 16th-floor apartment on West 86th Street in Manhattan. She was alone in her home at the time.

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