Toni Lee Scott was born in San Francisco on January 15, 1933, but that name may not be familiar to her former schoolmates. The daughter of Vivian Scott and Pietro Georgi, she was registered at Mt. Carmel School and at Sequoia High School as Toni Lee Georgi, when she still had her father’s last name. Georgi was a professional fighter by trade who, in addition to becoming a light-heavyweight title contender, played several instruments.

Music was a part of Toni’s life from an early age, and she dreamed of one day becoming a professional singer. Opportunity knocked when she enrolled at Holy Cross Convent School in Santa Cruz, California. By then, her parents were separated, and she had been thinking about leaving school for a while. She made up her mind after spending three months with her father in Miami, where she entered a bathing beauty contest and learned some boxing.

She moved to San Francisco to pursue her dream of becoming a professional singer, often hanging around a theatrical agency, hoping that somebody would be interested in auditioning her, or the local Musicians Union. One day, she got the chance to join the Bob Emerson Orchestra at the Fairmont Gold Room. She was thirteen at the time, so had to lie about her age to be allowed to perform. She would hang around with “all the musicians who would put up with me” and listened to Billie Holiday and Dave Brubeck at the Blackhawk club, developing a soft spot for horn players. It was from them that she picked up some of her inflections. These experiences, together with her hard work and lovely voice, led to her singing a few numbers with the Stan Kenton Band at the age of just 16.

Heartened by the opportunity, Toni became more determined than ever to become a professional singer. Like many other young girls, Toni moved to Los Angeles in January 1952, at the age of 18, trying to get a break as a vocalist. The going was somewhat rough with only occasional offers coming her way, so she got a job as a carhop at a drive-in restaurant on the corner of Sepulveda and Venice Boulevard. By August, she was married and settling into her new life.

On the late afternoon of September 8, 1952, she arrived at work early and a friend asked her if she wanted to go on a motorcycle ride with him on his Harley Davidson. All went well until suddenly the car ahead of them was involved in an accident. They managed to stop, but the driver behind them didn’t hit the breaks in time. The car swerved and rammed into them, throwing Toni seventy feet forward, later running over her left leg as she laid on the pavement. A motorcycle officer improvised a tourniquet on her leg, and she was taken to the Santa Monica Hospital.

During her stay, she underwent 24 separate operations as the doctors tried to save her leg. Ever hopeful and perky, at Christmas time Toni tried to cheer up her fellow patients by singing carols, but after months in the hospital the bills were piling up, draining whatever savings she and her mother had, and leaving her $35,000 in debt. What’s more, her marriage dissolved during the ordeal. Her husband, who turned out to be a heroin addict, abandoned her in her time of need.

In 1954, she underwent further surgery where they amputated her left leg just below the knee. It took Toni five years to walk again, but before she regained mobility thanks to a prosthetic limb, she was already singing again. She sang on the daytime John Mulaney Show in Los Angeles, propped up against the piano. The arrangement was that there would be no long shots revealing the absence of her leg. “I wanted to be judged on my talent, not out of sympathy,” she later said. In the evenings, she worked as a switchboard operator at the KFI radio station, then as a receptionist in an office, with occasional appearances on the Larry Finley TV show. However hard she worked she was unable to escape her debts, and, in February 1955, she filed for voluntary bankruptcy. It was around this time that she had a chance encounter with James Dean in a coffee shop at 8100 Sunset Boulevard on the way to her job as a waitress.

The following 18 months would change her life forever. “On my way to work in the mornings, I’d often stop at Googies for breakfast to catch up on the previous night’s happenings. It was a place to go for the ‘would-bes, has-beens, and the maybes’ of the movie industry. Frequently I sat next to a sleepyeyed, tousle-headed kid. Aside from mumbling ‘pass the sugar,’ we rarely spoke. Each morning after breakfast he’d go out, hop on his motorcycle, and blast off.”

Their friendship developed over late-night talks, and they helped each other through hard times. James Dean helped Toni regain her confidence and return to her singing career. She started taking lessons at Arthur Murray Dance Studios and coached Dean through his emotional break-up with actress Pier Angeli.

With renewed courage Toni focused on her singing career and, on June 9, 1956, she was the featured vocalist with Wally White’s Top Tops Quartet at Lenzi’s in Eureka. On February 9, 1957, she appeared with The Moonglows at Charlie Anderson’s Domino Club Penthouse sporting a fluorescent hairdo and accompanied by Abe Battat’s group. These were merely odd jobs and her visit to visits to booking agencies often proved fruitless, so, while waiting for an opportunity to arise, she became a secretary for actress Corrine Calvert. She kept up her vocal practice and was once heard by Ted FloRito, who offered her the opportunity to make a second comeback in the entertainment world, on TV and a nightclub tour.

Later, in June 1957, she was offered a job singing every day with the Nob Hill Trio at the Kona Club in El Cerrito, across the bay from San Francisco. One night, trumpeter and bandleader Bob Scobey was sitting at the bar while Toni was singing in the main room. After she finished her set, Scobey decided to hire her. She told him she only had one leg and asked whether that would be a problem. Scobey’s reply: “Of course not. I want you to sing, not to dance!” In August, she got her big break when she was featured as a solo vocalist with Bob Scobey and his Frisco Jazz Band at Harrah’s Stateline Country Club in Lake Tahoe.

“Bob Scobey gave me a tremendous lift,” she said. “He was a wise, wise man. And he gave me the best of advice. He taught me that there are no excuses. You shouldn’t waste time with excuses. You do your best, and then you go on to the next thing: the next song.” Scobey’s band was constantly traveling around the country playing to audiences that varied from the sophisticated nightclub patrons of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and Basin Street in New York to the enthusiastic audiences at college jazz concerts.

In 1959, Toni went to Chicago with Bob Scobey’s band, and they performed to great acclaim in the Embassy Room of the Continental Café. Suddenly, Dixieland became a buzzword, and club owners using the same format as Scobey turned out to be a boon to older fans. As a result of his unexpected success, Scobey decided to stay with his band for a while in the Windy City.

That same year, motivated by her own experience, Toni founded the M.A.R.G.I.E. (Mutual Amputee Rally to Give Individuals Encouragement) organization. Her aim was to help kids cope with the loss of a limb and obtain properlymade and fitted prosthetic limbs, so they could return to active life.

In the summer of 1960, Toni joined the many other vocalists trying to make it as a solo artist, first singing accompanied by another former Scobey member, banjoist Clancy Hayes and his band The Dixiecrats at the Embassy, and then with her own group. She later appeared at Mr. Kelly’s, Club Pigalle, the Fountain Room, the Porterhouse, the Dome, the Playboy Club, the Celebrity Lounge, O’Hare-Sahara, and the Ups ‘n Down Club. Having been singing Dixieland jazz so well for so long, Toni “became suave and sophisticated,” wrote one journalist, “who lost interest in the ramblings of muskrats or the marching in of saints.

Toni has always had a strong social conscience, and, in 1961, the National Heart Association named her Woman of the Year. In 1962, an association working with cerebral palsy chose Toni (over Jerry Lewis) as Entertainer of the Year. In January 1963, after a brief hospitalization for pneumonia, Toni recovered and sounded great at Mr. T’s, a posh Chicago bistro in North Sheridan that had recently opened. Jazz authority Leonard Feather, as critic of Down Beat, nominated Toni as Girl Vocalist of 1964. “Her sound is mature; this is a woman singing, not a little girl, and one with a highly emotional feeling for ballads”, wrote Feather. “Her sound is firm but tender. Her most remarkable quality, though, is her complete control, both of herself and the audience.”

Many know Toni Lee Scott for her 1960 appearance on the TV show This Is Your Life hosted by Ralph Edwards, where she sang and for millions of Americans while they learned about her life. Over the years, she also appeared on The Tonight Show hosted by Johnny Carson. From 1963 onwards, she could be seen performing at Playboy clubs around the country for the next 14 years. She also had her own radio show and co-authored the book A Kind of Loving (The World Publishing Company, New York, 1970) with writer Curt Gentry which described her life after the motorcycle accident.

Toni left Chicago in June 1969, “because I had done everything there was to do.” There followed a six-year stay in Phoenix that began happily but ended in gloom. It was from there that a depressed Toni Lee Scott returned in the spring of 1974 to the Bay Area, first to San Francisco (“but I found I couldn’t stay there. It had changed, and all for the bad,” she recalled) and in 1975 she moved north. In San Rafael, she climbed back to the high-spirited, full-of-life singer she was, when she started working at the Velvet Turtle, accompanied by pianist Shelly Robbins.

As a jazz singer, Toni Lee Scott is known for her rich voice, deep and full of meaning. Her eloquent mastery of smooth vocal gymnastics and diverse stylings have earned her the respect of other musicians. She successfully appeared in clubs and restaurants all over the country singing tender ballads, blues, and jazz tunes. Her only full-length record, "Vol. Lonely," came out on Äva Records in 1963, shortly after the label changed its name from Choreo Records.

Toni Lee Scott is a singing legend. She is considered something of a “singer’s singer,” possessing perhaps too wide a range of specialties to become known for any one particular approach. Throughout her career, her sophisticated musical arrangements and stylings have captivated audiences from coast to coast, with her own cabaret-style show. The singer of whom the Chicago Tribune wrote “grabs you by the heart.”

—Jordi Pujol (Taken from the inside liner-notes of FSRV 137)