Wesla Whitfield

On February 9, 2018, Whitfield died of complications of bladder cancer at her home in St. Helena, California, at age 70.

In the late 1990s, Whitfield and Greensill toured with a production of Life Upon the Wicked Stage, a "semi-autographical show" featuring Whitfield's singing. A review in The San Francisco Examiner described the show as "An absolutely marvelous evening of musical theater."

Whitfield was married to, and divorced from, Richard Whitfield and Wilfred Berg. She married jazz pianist Mike Greensill in 1986. He had been her pianist and arranger, and he continued in those roles after their marriage.

In 1985, she and her husband created the Myoho label for her albums. After three releases, HighNote Records began distributing Whitfield's recordings.

Whitfield resisted efforts to classify her style of singing. Although she was described by others as a jazz singer or a cabaret singer, she once said, "I don't claim to be anything. I just show up at the gig." She was shot in an attempted robbery in 1977; she survived and used a wheelchair after that time.

In 1977, two boys approached Whitfield on a street in San Francisco and told her to go with them. As she turned away, one shot at her. The bullet hit her spine, paralyzing her from the waist down. She sang for about three months soon after the shooting but stopped because "... it was quite boring because I really wasn't there mentally or emotionally." When she resumed performing, her husband carried her on stage to sit on a stool or chair because she thought her wheelchair would distract from her singing.

Trained as a coloratura soprano, in 1971 Whitfield began to sing in the chorus of the San Francisco Opera. Finding that type of music unsatisfying, she sometimes followed operatic performances with stops at piano bars, where she performed familiar songs whose composers included Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Rodgers and Hart. She later explained her preference by saying: "In opera, the voice was the only thing of importance. The Lyric and the story didn't count, and that was boring to me. I'm very interested in the song and the story that it has to tell."

Wesla Whitfield (born Weslia Marie Edwards, September 15, 1947 – February 9, 2018) was an American singer who recorded more than a score of albums and performed at Carnegie Hall and the White House, among other sites. She used a wheelchair for the last four decades of her life, after surviving a gunshot injury. She specialized in the American standards genre of music.