A torch song is plainly defined as a sentimental song of unrequited love; The name comes from the phrase “to carry a torch for” (to be in love). It’s most associated with the Great American Songbook: the canon of influential American popular songs, show tunes and jazz standards released from the 1920s to the 1960s. Torch songs are defined by the lyrical themes of love, loss and longing rather than an allegiance to a particular genre. This musical categorization, though—as is the case with most—can only really be understood by example.
There is nothing petite about Brenda Lee’s voice, though: she has what John Lennon called “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll voice of them all” (in 1962, at the height of her popularity, The Beatles opened for her). Today, she is best known for her single “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” which she recorded at 13. It still makes its appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 every December.
Lee grew up in poverty in Georgia, and when her father died, she became the family’s sole breadwinner at the age of eight. Her mother would drive Lee and her two siblings to her studio sessions and performances across the country. She slept up in the back window of the car—small enough to tuck herself away behind the backseat headrests.
Her broader discography includes several torch songs; Taylor Swift called her “the singer who mastered the sound of heartbreak.” And yet many of those wrenching ballads were sung by a child.
Lee herself isn’t sure—she had her first date at 18, and she married him. She may not have known romantic heartbreak, but she was no stranger to longing. Lee has always been singing as if her life depended on it, because it did. Even if she couldn’t relate to the lyrics of her early torch songs like “I’m Sorry” and “All Alone Am I,” the longing was there—and it was visceral.
Holiday grew up in extreme poverty in Baltimore. She dropped out of school in fifth grade and took a job running errands for a brothel. At 12, she and her mother moved to Harlem, where Holiday tried to find work as a dancer in a speakeasy.
When there were no openings for dancers, she auditioned to sing instead—and so began her career as one of the greatest jazz singers of all time. Holiday spent much of the 1930s performing and partnering with the biggest names in jazz, including the saxophonist Lester Young, a close friend and collaborator who gave her the nickname Lady Day.
As her fame grew, so too did her heroin addiction and alcoholism. After she recorded “Strange Fruit” in 1939—a haunting protest song about lynching—the FBI zeroed in on Holiday. She was arrested multiple times (ostensibly on drug charges), served a prison sentence and endured two decades of police harassment. She was a famous wealthy queer Black woman who sang about lynching some two decades before the civil rights movement: the U.S. government put a target on her back.
Despite the state’s efforts to make an example of Holiday, she continued to build a vast body of work. Her most famous torch song is “I’ll Be Seeing You,” which was originally written for the 1938 musical “Right This Way.” The song was recorded by several artists in the years following—including Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra—but it’s Holiday’s perfectly melancholy version that remains the most well-known today.
She was performing by age four and joined her older sisters’ singing-and-dancing group ‘The Gumm Sisters’ at seven. The Gumm family moved to California in 1926 in the hopes that the sisters might find fame; by the time they arrived in Hollywood, they’d reinvented themselves as the Garlands.
At 13, Judy Garland signed a contract with MGM, then one of the biggest film studios in the world. MGM had near-total control over the actors they represented, and they were ruthless in their curation of early American celebrity. MGM marketed Garland as an “ugly duckling” character, and she was repeatedly cast as the girl-next-door with an unrequited crush.
As a child, Garland was taking diet pills and eating very little at the insistence of her managers. She was cycling through amphetamines to keep up with her schedule and barbiturates to be able to sleep. She was also wildly successful.
Her role as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz”—which was released when she was just 16—solidified her place in Hollywood. She appeared in more than two dozen MGM films, many of them musicals.
By the early 1950s, things had slipped out of control. She and her second husband Vincent Minnelli (with whom she had her first daughter, Liza) split up, and she left MGM after a series of suspensions and publicized mental health struggles.
She made a famous comeback in the 1954 classic “A Star is Born,” which tells the story of the knife edge between fame and addiction. In it, she delivers the gutting torch song “The Man that Got Away.”
As Minnelli stepped out of her mother’s shadow and began to make a name for herself in New York theater, Garland increasingly succumbed to her addictions. When she passed from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills in 1969, Minnelli was devastated. Her doctor prescribed Valium to help her sleep while she grieved, which marked the beginning of her own substance abuse issues.
In the wake of her mother’s death, Minnelli’s rise to fame began in earnest. Her big break was the 1972 musical “Cabaret.” She was the star, and her look for the show—blue eye shadow and long, spidery eyelashes—remains her most iconic image. In “Cabaret,” she belts out one of her best-known torch songs “Maybe This Time.”
In the 1970s and 80s, Minnelli was part of an elite celebrity crew moving through New York City nightclubs. Andy Warhol’s diary, which was published posthumously, described her as bursting into parties and asking for every drug they’ve got.
Minnelli has spent her life shirking comparisons to her mother: for their raw talent, their shared reverence in queer communities, their litanies of failed marriages, and their addictions.
There is no denying that Minnelli is her mother’s daughter—but she’s struck a balance between repeating history and pointedly making it new. On her electronic pop album “Results,” Minnelli sings “Losing My Mind”—a torch song originally written for the 1971 musical “Follies”—set to a disco beat.
Nina Simone singing in Ronnie Scott club 1983. Janine Wiedel Photolibrary / Alamy Stock Photo
In 1950, she began studying at Julliard and auditioned for a scholarship at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She was rejected, a decision she maintained was based in racial discrimination. And yet it was a rejection that changed the course of her life.
Simone resolved to re-audition, but in the interim she got a job playing jazz piano at Atlantic City’s Midtown Bar and Grill. She knew her religious mother would disapprove of her working in a seedy bar, so she took on a stage name: Nina Simone. She was also told she’d need to start singing while she played. At the start of her career as a jazz singer, she sang mostly love songs—including several torch songs. On “Love Me Or Leave Me,” she delivers the titular ultimatum over a bouncy string of piano notes she plays effortlessly.
In 1963, the bombing of a Black church in Birmingham Alabama ushered in a new era for Simone. She wrote the song “Mississippi Goddamn,” the first of many protest songs. While she is most remembered for her resistance music, the emotion in her voice holds transformative power—whether she’s longing for love or longing for freedom.
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This is by no means a comprehensive list of historic torch singers, but hopefully it offers a glimpse into the range of voices that make up that canon—and the people behind the microphone.
When Rolling Stone asked Brenda Lee how she sang so convincingly about love and loss while she was still a child, she told them it wasn’t a matter of logic. “I call it that gut thing that comes out,” she said, “a feeling coming from your toes that just says, ‘Okay, this is it.’”
Perhaps that’s the common thread of torch songs: not necessarily heartbreak, but “that gut thing that comes out.”
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer.
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