When Whitney Balliett's American Musicians appeared in the Fall of 1986, the acclaim it received was universal. Leonard Feather, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said "no other writer now living can write with comparable grace and equal enthusiasm about everyone from Jack Teagarden and Art Tatum to Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman." And Bruce Cook in The New Leader called the book "the quintessential Whitney Balliett, the cream of the cream, a collection that leaves no doubt about his strength."
That book gathered together all of Balliett's profiles of jazz instrumentalists. Here, in the revised edition of American Singers, Balliett has added thirteen new biographical profiles to double the size of the book and provide the perfect complement to American Musicians. It now contains all the profiles on singers that Balliett has written for The New Yorker. Alongside original chapters on such great vocalists as Ray Charles, Tony Bennett, Joe Tur