Ernestine Irene Anderson on November 11, 1928. Her mother, Erma, was a housewife, and her father, Joseph, a construction worker who sang bass in a gospel quartet. By the age of three, Anderson showed a talent for singing along with her parents' old blues 78 rpm records by the likes of
Bessie "The Empress of the Blues" Smith. Anderson started singing at a local church, singing solos in its gospel choir. Anderson tells of her early life in the 1998 book
The Jazz Scene: :"My parents used to play blues records all the time," Ernestine Anderson told me. "
John Lee Hooker,
Muddy Waters, all the blues greats. In Houston, where I grew up, you turned on the radio and what you got was country and western and gospel. I don't even remember what my first experience with music was. I sort of grew into it. My father sang in a gospel quartet and I used to follow him around, and both my grandparents sang in the Baptist church choir. And they had big bands coming through Houston like
Jimmie Lunceford,
Billy Eckstine,
Erskine Hawkins, and
Count Basie." Ernestine's godmother entered her in a local talent contest when she was twelve years old. "I only knew two songs," she admitted, "'
On the Sunny Side of the Street' and 'So Long'. The piano player asked me what key did I do these songs in and I just said 'C' for some reason and it was the wrong key. In order to save face I sang around the melody, improvised among the melody, and when I finished one of the musicians told me I was a jazz singer." Her family moved to
Seattle, Washington, in 1944, In 1952, she went on tour with
Lionel Hampton's orchestra. led to a partnership with trumpeter
Rolf Ericson for a three-month Scandinavian tour. Her re-emergence in the mid-1970s (at which time Ray Brown was her manager) came as a result of a sensational appearance at the 1976
Concord Jazz Festival. Ernestine Anderson was a follower of
Nichiren Buddhism. She died peacefully, surrounded by her family in
Shoreline,
Washington, on March 10, 2016, at the age of 87. Ernestine Anderson's great-grandson, Dwone Anderson-Young, was murdered on June 1, 2014. ==Awards and honors==