Sylvia Syms (singer)

Biography

Sylvia Syms, born Sylvia Blagman in Brooklyn, New York, contracted polio in her childhood. During her teenage years, she frequented the jazz clubs of New York's 52nd Street, where she picked up informal lessons from Billie Holiday. She first performed in 1941 at Kelly's Stable. In 1948, while singing at the Cinderella Club in Greenwich Village, Mae West spotted her and cast her in a show. Frank Sinatra, who called her the world's greatest saloon singer, conducted Syms's 1982 album, Syms by Sinatra. She signed with Decca Records and scored a major hit in 1956 with "I Could Have Danced All Night," which sold over a million copies and earned a gold disc. She was a regular performer at the Carlyle in Manhattan, sometimes leaving the bar mid-cocktail to join Bobby Short on stage. In 1972, she had a lung removed but kept working, playing Bloody Mary in South Pacific at the Chateau de Ville Dinner Theater. She died of a heart attack on stage in the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City on May 10, 1992, at age 74.