Beryl Audley Bryden was an English

English people

The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...

 jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 singer, who played with Chris Barber

Chris Barber

Donald Christopher 'Chris' Barber is best known as a jazz trombonist. As well as scoring a UK top twenty trad jazz hit he helped the careers of many musicians, notably the blues singer Ottilie Patterson, who was at one time his wife, and vocalist/banjoist Lonnie Donegan, whose appearances with...

 and Lonnie Donegan

Lonnie Donegan

Anthony James "Lonnie" Donegan MBE was a skiffle musician, with more than 20 UK Top 30 hits to his name. He is known as the "King of Skiffle" and is often cited as a large influence on the generation of British musicians who became famous in the 1960s...

. Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Jane Fitzgerald , also known as the "First Lady of Song" and "Lady Ella," was an American jazz and song vocalist...

 once said of Bryden that she was "Britain's queen of the blues".

Life and career

Bryden was born in Norwich

Norwich

Norwich is a city in England. It is the regional administrative centre and county town of Norfolk. During the 11th century, Norwich was the largest city in England after London, and one of the most important places in the kingdom...

, Norfolk

Norfolk

Norfolk is a low-lying county in the East of England. It has borders with Lincolnshire to the west, Cambridgeshire to the west and southwest and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the North Sea coast and to the north-west the county is bordered by The Wash. The county...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. An ardent jazz fan she established a Nat Gonella

Nat Gonella

Nathaniel Charles Gonella was an English jazz trumpeter, bandleader, vocalist and mellophonist born in London, perhaps most notable for his work with the big band he founded, The Georgians....

 fan club in her teens, before taking up the washboard and singing. Her vocal style was influenced by Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith was an American blues singer.Sometimes referred to as The Empress of the Blues, Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s...

 but she avoided affectation of an American accent.

She sang with the Humphrey Lyttelton

Humphrey Lyttelton

Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton , also known as Humph, was an English jazz musician and broadcaster, and chairman of the BBC radio comedy programme I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue...

 band and with Freddy Randall

Freddy Randall

Frederick James 'Freddy' Randall was an English jazz trumpeter and bandleader born in Clapton, East London.Randall led the St. Louis Four in 1939, and played as a freelance sideman in the early 1940s. He served in the military during World War II, then played with Freddy Mirfield in a group...

 at London jazz venues such as the Cook's Ferry Inn. She became a supporter of visiting American jazz acts when the Musicians Union ban was lifted and befriended, amongst others, Buck Clayton

Buck Clayton

Buck Clayton was an American jazz trumpet player who was a leading member of Count Basie’s "Old Testament" orchestra and a leader of mainstream-oriented jam session recordings in the 1950s. His principal influence was Louis Armstrong...

, Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana....

 and Bud Freeman

Bud Freeman

Lawrence "Bud" Freeman was a U.S. jazz musician, bandleader, and composer, known mainly for playing the tenor saxophone, but also able at the clarinet. He had a smooth and full tenor sax style with a heavy robust swing. He was one of the most influential and important jazz tenor saxophonists of...

, with whom she recorded.

She joined the Chris Barber band on washboard, and played on the group's gold disc

Music recording sales certification

Music recording sales certification is a system of certifying that a music recording has shipped or sold a certain number of copies, where the threshold quantity varies by type and by nation or territory .Almost all countries follow variations of the RIAA certification categories,...

 earning, "Rock Island Line" in 1955 with Lonnie Donegan on vocals. She later graduated to the Monty Sunshine

Monty Sunshine

Monty Sunshine was an English jazz clarinetist, whose main claim to fame was his clarinet solo on the track "Petite Fleur", a million seller for the Chris Barber Jazz Band in 1959...

 jazz band, where she covered Bessie Smith ("Young Woman's Blues", "Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer)") and long-term favourite "Coney Island Washboard Blues", which demonstrated her washboard technique.

She remained active at the end of the British trad jazz boom, and became particularly popular in Northern Europe, playing with the Ted Easton Jazz Band and The Piccadilly Six. In 1979, she headlined the North Sea Jazz Festival

North Sea Jazz Festival

The North Sea Jazz Festival is an annual jazz festival held each second weekend of July in the Netherlands at the Ahoy venue. It used to be in The Hague but since 2006 it has been held in Rotterdam...

 with Rod Mason and His Hot Five. In the 1980s she often sang with the New Orleans Syncopators, a Dutch jazz band, whom she recorded an album with.

In the 1970s, became the only British female jazz musician to be awarded the freedom of the City of New Orleans.

She remained active into the 1990s, playing with the Metropolitan Jazz Band, Digby Fairweather

Digby Fairweather

Digby Fairweather is a British jazz cornettist and broadcaster.-Biography:Fairweather has been a professional jazz musician since 1 January 1977, but worked for seven years previously with several local jazz bands in the Essex area and recorded his first album in 1975...

, Nat Gonella and her own Blue Boys. She made her last recording with Gonella in 1998, shortly before her death.

Bryden died in 1998 at the age of 78.

External links

• [ Allmusic]

• Beryl Bryden and The Piccadilly Six, Elite Special (1975). Liner notes