In a profession that specializes in novelty, Negro Chanteuse Joyce Bryant looks startlingly different. Her poodle-cut hair is dazzling silver, her inch-long fingernails are stained to match. Her dress is a backless, spangled sheath, and as she sings every inch of her lean body writhes feverishly. Last week, at 25, she was the headliner at Manhattan's Copacabana, and reaching for a spot among the top two or three Negro nightclub singers of the day.
With a voice that can be a shy soprano but is more often a belting baritone, Joyce Bryant seems to have trouble relaxing onstage. To her credit, she tries: after a sweltering bout with Porgy, she begins a blander number, e.g., After You've Gone or You Made Me Love You. But before the end of the first chorus, the song seems to take its own head, and her voice mounts until it sobs and gargles on the edge of hysteria. Next moment she is off again on a frenzied version of Tzena, Tzena, Tzena or Runnin' Wild, finally plunges into the doleful depths of Love for Sale, her standard windup number.
Adventist in Los Angeles. "People tell me I should never end a show with such a sad number," she says. "Most entertainers end with a life-of-the-party number. Not me. I leave them way down. Sometimes I see people crying in the audience. I guess people like to cry."
Joyce finds it hard to explain where her style came from. She never sang until five years ago, and she came from a San Francisco family of strict Seventh-Day Adventists. On her way to the Adventists' Oakwood College in Huntsville, Ala., she stopped off for a look at Los Angeles, visited a small nightclub, and landed a singing job after getting into an audience-participation act. She was the demure type in those days, with long hair and bouffant dresses—"real silly." She played such big rooms as Giro's in Hollywood and New Jersey's Riviera with "moderate success."
Europe in the Making. Two years ago she developed a taste for "slinky, sexy" gowns, decided "I couldn't wear those gowns with long curls, so off came the hair." Then she had a screen test in an old-woman part, and "the silver in my hair looked so good I decided to keep it as part of the new me." About the same time she made her first recording, a low-down ditty called Drunk With Love, which was immediately banned from the radio. "Most of my records are banned," she says with a slightly puzzled air. "Not dirty, just—banned."
And so, almost automatically, she became a belter. She found herself "living" every song she sang, and had to discard such gloomy numbers as Stormy Weather because "it ruined me and it ruined the audience."
Nowadays, she still has to revive herself after every performance with salt tablets, vitamins and warm water, still loses a pound or so every performance. But Belter Bryant thinks she has found herself, is solidly booked in the gaudiest U.S. spots, and has a European tour in the making.