Here is a sampling of some of the most active jazz vocalists of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s: Louis Armstrong, Ivy Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Bessie Smith, Sonny Terry and Ma Rainey. They are backed by equally big-time instrumentalists: Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Dorsey, Count Basie and Bix Beiderbecke who, according to legend, threw a week’s pay on the floor the first night he heard Bessie Smith, hoping her singing would never end.

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