>
Pearl Bailey
This Broadway musical star was noted for her trademark song delivery in which she interrupted a number to make comic asides to the audience. Bailey began her career performing in amateur shows and as a band singer in vaudeville and cabarets where she was known at first as the younger sister of dancer Bill Bailey. By the mid-1940s, she had evolved her own unique style of delivery--a slyly sultry and husky drawl--and her superb comic timing which she displayed in her hit recording "Tired" and her show-stopping performance in the 1946 Broadway musical "St. Louis Woman."