A vibrant, legendary R&B voice was stilled Monday. LaVern Baker, in the midst of a comeback in which she stole the show at the Newport R&B Festival last summer, died of heart complications Monday at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital in New York. She was 67.
The news came as a devastating blow to R&B fans who had shared so lovingly in her recent comeback in Boston. Baker used a wheelchair in recent years because both legs had been amputated following diabetic complications, but she was learning to walk on $20,000 prosthetic limbs donated by United Prosthetics in Dorchester.In Boston, she was doing physical therapy at Spaulding Rehabilitation Center and performed at Scullers in January, wearing the artificial legs but not walking with them on stage.
"The Scullers gigs were fantastic," her Boston-based bandleader, Barry Marshall, said Monday. "Her life force was so strong. She had come back so many times that I thought she'd keep doing it."
Baker, an electrifying singer, was the second woman ever inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame (following Aretha Franklin). A Chicago native originally billed as "Little Miss Sharecropper" in the '40s, she had her greatest success in the '50s with five Top 40 hits: "Tweedle Dee," "Jim Dandy," "I Cried a Tear" (which presaged the soul ballad era of the '60s), "I Can't Love You Enough," and "I Waited Too Long." In the '60s she hit with "See See Rider," later done by such groups as the Animals and the Grateful Dead.
"She lived to have a good time," Jimmy Glover, her brother and manager, said Monday from New York. "She was very free-handed. She would give people just about anything. And she was a fighter. Nothing was too big for her to challenge."
Baker, whose given name was Dolores Williams, was a special favorite of Elvis Presley (who did eight of her songs in his repertoire). She played the famous Alan Freed show with Bo Diddley at Boston Arena in the '50s and also was a member of the first rock 'n' roll bus tours with Diddley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard.
She might have been a bigger star had she not spent 23 years in the Philippines as show director for the Marine Corps.