Myra Taylor (singer)
American jazz singer and songwriter (1917-2011)
Myra Taylor (February 24, 1917 – December 9, 2011) was an American jazz singer and songwriter. She began performing as a teenager and continued into her nineties.
Early life
Myra Jardine Render, later Taylor, was born in Bonner Springs, Kansas, but her family moved to Kansas City, Missouri's historic 18th and Vine area when she was a child. Working as a housekeeper at age 14, she began dancing at the Sunset and Reno clubs on 12th street. Being underage, she entered some clubs by sneaking in through a rear window and eventually attracted attention singing.
Acting career
Taylor appeared as the character Pearl in three episodes of the US television program The Jeffersons - The Arrival (Part 1) and The Arrival (Part 2) in 1980 and Men of the Cloth in 1982
She was the lead in the 1979 women's professional basketball comedy Scoring, as well as supporting roles in Suspect, Crossing Delancey, Lasse Hallström's Once Around, and Ron Howard's The Paper.
Music career
In the 1930s, she toured the Midwest with Clarence Love's band. She moved to Chicago in 1937 and worked with Warren "Baby" Dodds, Lonnie Johnson, Roy Eldridge and Lil Hardin Armstrong. She returned to Kansas City in 1940 and Harlan Leonard hired Taylor as the featured singer for his new band Harlan Leonard and His Rockets. The band had a lengthy engagement at Harlem's Golden Gate Ballroom.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Myra Taylor (singer)” as american jazz singer and songwriter (1917-2011). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american jazz singer and songwriter (1917-2011). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1798999. VIAF identifies the subject as 14444716. The Library of Congress control number is no2002088806. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1917, 2011, 1980 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Myra Taylor (singer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.