Joyce Bryant is a former jazz singer who was very famous back in the day. When we came across two photos of her and couldn’t choose between them, we decided to use both. In the first she’s done up in a frosty silver motif, and the second one, below, shows her in normal mode. But maybe it would be more accurate to call her silver persona the normal one—she performed in a silvery hairdo and shiny dresses, and the look earned her the nickname “The Bronze Blond Bombshell,” among others. Her singing career ran from the late-1940s until 1955, when she stopped performing to focus on church activities. That’s the condensed version. The long version is she managed to keep the music industry’s hustlers, gangsters, and drug dealers at arm’s length for years, but the mighty stress of doing that, plus performing nightly, was eventually too much, and she just had to leave. She made a comeback ten years later as a classical vocalist. She’s still around at the age of eighty-eight. The year on the top photo is 1953, and on the bottom it’s unknown.
