Thoughtful Thrush

Felicia Sanders is a black-haired young vocalist with a poodle cut who got her big break after three years of trouping in the U.S.'s lesser nightspots. With a big voice (she can sing without a microphone) a handsome, expressive face and an adventurous spirit, she was still trying to decide between straight dramatic singing and belting out songs with a "progressive" band when the break came: Columbia Records' Percy Faith asked her to fill in the vocals in his version of Song from Moulin Rouge. Last week, after 17 weeks on the bestseller lists, the record had sold 1,000,000 copies, and Felicia Sanders had become a pop-music name.

Cheers and attention started coming Felicia's way last winter, soon after she recorded Moulin Rouge. She was booked into Manhattan's Blue Angel nightclub almost before she knew it, and before she had decided just what her stage personality should be. Reviewers for Variety and Billboard made identical report: "This thrush [is a] comer." But when the run was over, thoughtful Felicia went home to Los Angeles for some hard work on her voice and material.

Her aim now, after due reflection: "To find something similar to Edith Piaf's Parisian material but in the American idiom, a song with a story about people." When she finds a song she likes, she works on it like an actor boning up on a script. "A song deals with a person," she tells herself. "I have to get an image of that person and convey that image to everyone else." Songstress Sanders also tries for "a sort of sexiness which accepts sex without having to emphasize it."

Last week, back in the Blue Angel before packed audiences, Felicia was showing the results of her study. Wearing a plain black dress with a demure neckline, she sang with her hands pressed flat to her sides, used her face to help express the music. Her voice, which last winter often verged on a maudlin wobble, was fine-grained and pure even when she let it out in the climaxes. She ranged from such a lighthearted number as Lucky To Be Me to a torchy version of Come Rain or Come Shine to a dramatic monologue about a girl who gets picked up by the man on the next bar stool; she managed to tinge them all with the air of a woman who has lived and loved it.

Songstress Sanders is still looking for material, finding to her satisfaction that her followers like her unfamiliar numbers almost as well as Moulin Rouge. When she winds up her run in Manhattan, she will head for home, then six weeks at Chicago's Black Orchid and more recordings. "Now," she says, "I know where I'm going and why."

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