Fifty years ago Chicago’s smart set could hardly avoid saloon singer Audrey Morris. Only in her 20s, she was a fixture at many of the city’s premier venues: the Copa, the Sands, the Streamline, the Churchill, Mr. Kelly’s. Providing her own spare, sophisticated piano accompaniment, she sang wry, world-weary ballads into the wee hours, bucking the current taste for bawdy chanteuses and cultivating a repertoire of obscure, understated material.
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It was the heyday of the supper club, and Morris lured many of music’s biggest names to her show: Billy Strayhorn, Lucy Reed, Chris Connor, Teddy Wilson, Billie Holiday. Duke Ellington stopped in to catch a set one night and told her, “You sure make my songs sound pretty.” By 1956 she had two albums under her belt, Bistro Ballads and The Voice of Audrey Morris, the latter arranged by the legendary Marty Paich. Given Morris’s movie-star looks and the popularity of cool jazz–which had already taken Chicago’s Jeri Southern to the top of the charts–Morris seemed poised to become the next big thing. There was only one problem: she wanted no part of it.
Morris also played for the dance school’s annual concert, and the year after she graduated from Hirsch High School a booking agent was in the audience. He came up to her after the show and offered her a spot in his touring all-girl band, the Chordettes. Morris bid farewell to Wilson Junior College, stuffed herself into one of the band’s two cars, and hit the road.
For nearly two decades Morris gigged all over town, but as rock and roll began to dominate the airwaves in the mid-1960s, the clubs began to disappear. After the birth of her son in 1968, she scaled back her work schedule to the occasional off night, and has accepted only a handful of full-time bookings since.
