We, the people of the world, have lost another great performer of music. She sung jazz and wrote songs. She passed yesterday, Saturday, August 14th, in New York. She was eighty years old. Her name was (is as long as her music last and that will be as long as there are recordings of sound and images.) -- Abby Lincoln.

Abbey Lincoln is being remembered as a lady who knew how to sing and to say something while she was singing, and that is saying something.

"I learned from Billie (Holiday)," Abby Lincoln told The Washington Post in 2006. "It isn't about showing how good your voice is. It's about saying something."

She was noted for a "simplified" singing style, for dropping the showiness. Showiness? The clever little tricks, expedients, use to deceive listeners into believing that they are hearing something, that speak true, when all they are being subjected to is theatrical fakery -- to artificiality, not to real emotions, not to art, but to artifice.

The Washington Post in its orbit of Abby Lincoln states --"Ms. Lincoln found early fame as a sex-kitten supper-club singer and made a cameo appearance in the campy 1956 teen film "The Girl Can't Help It," starring Jayne Mansfield. Later she became one of the first entertainers to make civil rights and racial pride an overt cause. She was a noted film actress in the 1960s.She starred with Ivan Dixon in the 1964 racial drama "Nothing But a Man" and as a maid opposite Sidney Poitier in "For Love of Ivy" (1968). The films were among the first Hollywood depictions of mature, loving relationships between black women and black men. She then retreated to obscurity before staging a remarkable comeback in the 1990s as a singer, songwriter and spiritual elder. I don't scream anymore," she said. "I sing about my life."

Abbey Lincoln, jazz singer, songwriter, actor, R.I.P.