by Janet Sommer (New York City)

Susannah McCorkle has been recording regularly throughout the past three decades, and has 17 albums to her credit, her most recent being the critically acclaimed From Broken Hearts to Blue Skies, released in April, 1999 on the Concord Jazz label. For someone who started her adult life wanting to be a multilingual translator, McCorkle has managed to integrate her early career training into what has become a trio of other careers. She is first of all a vocalist, and a translator of songs. Approval was given by Antonio Carlos Jobim for McCorkle’s translations of two of his songs, a rare act for a man who disliked many of the English versions of his lyric’s. Secondly, McCorkle is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She has written on American music for American Heritage and the New York Times Magazine. And finally, she is a music historian and educator, giving workshops for children of all ages, and enlightening her audiences on the composers and lyricists of the Great American Songbook.

This photo was from one of the first sessions I shot of McCorkle. She was not an easy subject in 1994, and she is no easier now. She knows that, and admits that for her, a photo shoot is something to give her full attention to, just as making a recording is. My job however, is to document the recording session, and I have to do that no matter how many doubts the artist may have. This was a rare moment in the vocalist’s booth, the two of us about ten inches part, when McCorkle was too engrossed in what was going on with the musicians to pay much attention to me. I have always loved the starkness of this photograph. A singer, a microphone, and a beam of light illuminating the source of the song, in all its solitude and vulnerability.