She had Alzheimer’s disease, said her niece Robyn LaBeaud.
Ms. Bryant was a sensation within the Fifties, drawing rapturous audiences at nightclubs from the Copacabana in Latest York, where she said she was the primary “identifiably Black” woman to perform, to venues in Miami Beach, where members of the Ku Klux Klan burned her in effigy to protest the looks of an African American artist.
In an era of uncompromising racial segregation, Ms. Bryant was promoted to Black and White audiences alike as a sex goddess. Sheathed in cleavage-baring mermaid gowns so tight that she writhed greater than walked, she had hits with the sensual numbers “Love for Sale” and “Drunk With Love,” each of which were banned from the radio.
Ms. Bryant used radiator paint to dye her hair silver in the course of the early years of her profession, achieving the signature look that many years later invited descriptions of her because the “Black Marilyn Monroe.” In her day, she was higher referred to as “the Belter,” a reference each to the ability of her four-octave voice and her habit — partly the results of her constraining stage wear — of beating her arms onstage like a boxer. She was said to have lost a pound or more in weight with every show.
“Joyce Bryant is a kind of pop singer that has virtually disappeared — a bravura performer who throws herself into all the pieces she sings with dramatic intensity,” critic John S. Wilson wrote within the Latest York Times in 1978.
“But even inside that limited sphere, Miss Bryant … is in school by herself,” he continued. “She has a remarkable voice that stretches from a high soprano and a gospel tremolo to a wealthy contralto that may turn right into a blood‐curdling growl.”
Ms. Bryant grew up in California and gave her first public performance at age 14, when she ventured right into a singalong club in Los Angeles. Her rendition of “On Top of Old Smoky” so impressed the audience that she received a two‐week contract for $125 per week. She got her true start when she was asked to fill in at Ciro’s club in Hollywood for singer Pearl Bailey, who had come down with laryngitis.
In her heyday Ms. Bryant was featured in magazines including Life and Time, which described her as certainly one of “the highest two or three” African American nightclub singers of the time. She was championed by radio commentator Walter Winchell and won engagements on the Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen television shows.
But “it wasn’t all that easy,” she told the Times in 1977. “I used to be being booked into totally White situations, singing the sort of songs that White singers sing. I didn’t fit the rhythm and blues or race‐music mold. I’m more like a Judy Garland in presentation. Lena Horne, Billy Daniels and Herb Jeffries could pass, musically. But I couldn’t. I can’t hide the undeniable fact that I’m a Black woman.”
Jim Byers, a number on the Washington-area radio station WPFW who’s at work on a documentary film titled “Joyce Bryant: The Lost Diva,” said that Ms. Bryant was solid in several movies but that her scenes were cut when Southern distributors refused to indicate a movie that depicted a Black woman in a glamorous role.
Ms. Bryant also was burdened by guilt in regards to the sexually suggestive nature of her performances, which clashed along with her devout Seventh-day Adventist upbringing. “Religion has all the time been an element of me,” she said, “and it was a really sinful thing that I used to be doing — being very sexy with tight, low‐cut gowns. It was difficult for my family. I had a guilty conscience.”
Moreover, she feared descending into drug dependence, as she had seen occur to many fellow performers. The “final straw,” she said, got here in late 1955, during a run on the Apollo Theater in Latest York City, where she was slated to perform eight shows a day. She had recently undergone a tonsillectomy and lost her voice amid the overwork.
When a physician offered to spray her throat with cocaine as a neighborhood anesthetic, her manager agreed and told the doctor, “Just make her sing!”
“The underside of my world fell out,” Ms. Bryant told the Times. “I spotted I used to be only a pound of flesh. I said to the doctor, ‘Thanks but no thanks. … ’ Then I went onstage and did a fashion show — I wore gowns and whispered to the audience. After I finished the week, I said to my manager, ‘I quit!’ ”
She had a reported $1 million in performance and recording contracts on the time.
Ms. Bryant enrolled at what’s now Oakwood University, a historically Black Seventh-day Adventist institution in Huntsville, Ala. She worked as a missionary before retraining, under the direction of Washington vocal coach Frederick Wilkerson, as a classical singer.
She performed for church fundraisers before starting a profession in opera, singing with the Latest York City Opera within the lead female role of the Gershwin opera “Porgy and Bess,” in addition to with European firms.
Ms. Bryant returned briefly to her former genre within the Nineteen Seventies, singing torch songs on the nightclub circuit where she had once made her name. She loved the music, she said, but not the life that had been forced on her.
“It’s very hard on this business. An individual falls in love with a star — they fall in love with a personality, not the person. You stop to grow to be an individual to them. They all the time wish to see you costumed like this, and if you happen to don’t, they’re insulted. They’ve got to have a star 24 hours a day,” she told The Washington Post in 1978.
“I had a greater than ample body for a 14-year-old, so that they made me right into a sex symbol, however it was ludicrous. I used to be just an unhappy child, under numerous pressure, who was pushed, pushed, pushed.”
Emily Ione Bryant, known from early childhood as Joyce, was born Oct. 14, 1927, in Oakland, Calif. Her father was a chef for the Southern Pacific Railroad. Ms. Bryant helped her mother, a homemaker, raise her seven siblings.
When Ms. Bryant sang, she recalled, her parents admonished her to “stop all that noise.” What little encouragement she received, she said, got here from a grandfather who had been a jazz trombonist. To her mother, she said, entertainment “meant prostitution and nothing else.”
Ms. Bryant was 14 when she married for the primary and only time — “to flee her family,” The Post reported. She separated from her husband after lower than a day, and their marriage was annulled. Her only immediate survivor is a brother.
Ms. Bryant toured for a period with ensembles before embarking on her solo profession. In her later years, she worked as a vocal coach.
Byers, the documentary filmmaker, said in an interview that he was drawn to Ms. Bryant because she was an individual “determined to live her life on her own terms.”
“She was willing to walk away from all the pieces that everybody wanted her to do, all of the things that society expected her to do,” he said. “She turned her back on it … for her own strength of character.”
In her performing days, Ms. Bryant often ended her shows with “Love for Sale,” a ballad a couple of prostitute eager for human connection.
“People tell me I should never end a show with such a tragic number,” she told Time magazine. “Most entertainers end with a life-of-the-party number. Not me. I leave them way down. Sometimes I see people crying within the audience. I suppose people wish to cry.”
