"Music is my primary language - I believe I was born to sing," said American jazz singer René Marie, though it took a long time before she was able to realise her dream. Having married at 18, she became a full-time mother, worked as a janitor, served at fast-food restaurant, was a clerk in a grocery store and worked in a bank before finally embarking on a professional music career at the age of 42.

Her first musical memory was hearing Ravel's 'Bolero' while she was still a toddler in Virginia and it was her father's vast record collection and eclectic interest in all kinds of music from classical to calypso and bluegrass that really stirred her musical imagination. As a teenager she sang in an R&B band but, while she constantly sang around the house, her early marriage and motherhood thwarted her musical ambitions for many years until her son Michael Croan - also a singer - persuaded her she should have a serious attempt to make music her life. So she gathered a group of musician friends and started performing jazz standards in local restaurants, gained wider fame after an appearance at Washington's famous Blues Alley and was signed to the MaxJazz label which released her early albums including 'How Can I Keep from Singing?' and 'Vertigo'.

Moving on from jazz standards she began writing her own material documenting the highs and lows of her own life. She achieved a wider following with her single 'This Is Not a Protest Song', signed with Motema and in 2011 released two significant albums 'The Love of My Beautiful Country' and 'Black Lace Freudian Slip'. Always unpredictable she followed this with a tribute to one of her heroes, Eartha Kitt with 'I Wanna Be Evil' but had her greatest success with her 2016 release 'Sound of Red' which earned her a Grammy nomination.

René Marie

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