Sandy Stewart

The ASCAP-Bob Harrington Lifetime Achievement Award

With a career spanning several decades, singer Sandy Stewart is just the sort of performer for whom the Bob Harrington Lifetime Achievement Award was intended. She has remained true to herself and thrived as an artist, no matter the passing fashions in popular music. Her talent for sensitively and intelligently revealing subtleties in American Songbook ballads is especially impressive.

Her career emerged at a time when American entertainment was changing dramatically. The big-band sound of the War years was still viable, although it had begun giving way to early rock and roll; swanky nightclubs were in vogue; and television was providing New York entertainers a new way to share their talents with audiences nationwide. Sandy Stewart found ways to adapt to these and other challenges with poise and enthusiasm.

She began as a child performer on local radio shows in her native Philadelphia. As a teenager in the 1950s, she appeared on Ernie Kovacs’ television program, first broadcast locally from Philadelphia and later nationwide from New York. She took a more prominent role when Kovacs’ wife, Edie Adams, left the program to appear in a Broadway show. 

Soon, young Stewart was seen on other nationally broadcast TV programs, including those hosted by Ed Sullivan and Perry Como. It was on Como’s program that she introduced the early Kander and Ebb song “My Coloring Book.” Her 1962 recording of that song went to #20 on Billboard and earned her a Grammy Award nomination.

Although Stewart had taken the leading female role in the 1959 rock-and-roll film Johnny B. Good, singing a lively rendition of “Playmates,” she gained greater acclaim in the 1960s in nightclubs: the Copacabana, Chicago’s Little Club, New Jersey’s Chubby’s, and others—singing with such bandleaders as Benny Goodman, Errol Garner, and Teddy Wilson.

After putting her professional life on the back burner to raise a family with her husband, the late Morris “Moose” Charlap, she was squarely back on the scene by the 1980s. A 1985 recording of Jerome Kern songs, made in collaboration with pianist Dick Hyman, was a career highlight. 

In more recent years, her approach to singing edged further into a jazz sensibility, especially in acclaimed club appearances and recordings with her son, celebrated jazz pianist Bill Charlap. 

Sandy Stewart was presented with the Mabel Mercer Award at the 2019 Cabaret Convention.