If anyone can be called a music diva here in the Berkshires, it is Wanda Houston, the powerful singer known for the breadth and variety of her repertoire. She will be the featured performer Saturday, Sept. 1 at Papa Bob’s Roadhouse in Becket, in a concert to benefit the Becket Arts Center. Her evolution as a singer had its roots in the gospel choirs of Chicago’s West Side, but it certainly didn’t stop there.
“I was the oldest of four,” Wanda remembered. “Mom was an actress, singer, dancer, model and secretary to my father, who ran a theater company. We had this wild, crazy, creative family, the house that everybody came to, the piano that everybody gathered around. My mother and grandmother sang in church, and so did I. Mahalia Jackson was my idol.”

She gathered her inspirations from her father’s eclectic record collection: “Those old Decca records with Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn. As a little girl, I tried to mimic Sarah. She just captured me.” And then there was Ethel Merman. And Barbra Streisand. And the Irish songs like “Danny Boy” that her father loved.
Very early on, Wanda learned to appreciate a great audience reaction. “I remember seeing my first movie: it was with Bette Davis; I went with my parents. I was maybe 3. The movie was called ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ and Bette was singing a song called ‘I’m Sending a Letter to Daddy.’ I yelled right out loud in the theater: ‘That’s not my daddy! This is my daddy!’ And the whole place broke up laughing. I loved hearing the audience laugh.”
Wanda’s folks were deeply involved in the civil rights movement, which created a musical legacy that was committed to exploring black roots while simultaneously introducing black entertainers to a greatly expanded white audience. “I was crazy about Gladys Knight and the Pips, Roberta Flack and the Beatles; oh, they changed everything in music—everything. I am still singing ‘Come Together’ and ‘Let It Be.’”
She went to college to study chemistry, heeding the message that often underscores the lives of creative people in every arts field: You can always do your art; what you need is to always be able to make a living. She was aiming to be a lab technician. “But I didn’t care for chemistry,” Wanda remembered. “So I switched and got my degree in music with a focus on opera. I was preparing for my Julliard auditions for graduate study when I got cold feet and went off to Los Angeles. I had a scholarship with a professor of music at USC.” It was during her time in LA that she gave up the idea of a career in opera.

She finally ended up in New York, in a play called “A Good Swift Kick.” “Which was just what that play got,” she laughed. “Right out of the theater.” However, the “Kick” had a silver lining: a review in the New York Times that said Wanda Houston was fantastic. From then on, Wanda worked. Singing. Acting. She toured with Martha and the Vandellas and the Platters, and sang at the Sands in Las Vegas. She learned the “business” of show business by working at Marriott’s Great America, the precursor of Six Flags. ”Four shows a day! That was a huge influence on me, that experience—got me out into the wide world.” She toured the capitols of Europe, spent a year in Australia and actually considered staying there for good. But her dream was still Broadway. “I went back to New York and landed a role in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ with John C. Reilly and Natasha Richardson. My character didn’t have a name. In Tennessee Williams’ script, it said I was ‘a Negro woman, singing.’” She added wryly, “I sang for people all over the world and came back home so I could become ‘a Negro woman.’”
In 2001 Wanda Houston finally settled in the Berkshires. The beauty and peacefulness of this place reminded her of the camping trips she and her family used to take when she was a kid. It was an unusual pastime for a black family back in the ‘60s, but it was part of the Houston way of life, the curiosity, the expansiveness that ultimately led a singer to her musical home.

“I’m not looking to be a style,” she said emphatically. “I’m looking to be a voice. I sing everything! I love all the music of our lives: the show tunes, the country, the blues, the opera, the jazz. It’s all related, the way we are all related. Africans didn’t come to this country singing jazz and blues. Jazz and blues were made here. The music ‘became’ itself right here in the good old US of A. Isn’t that how we all are, really? We are what is remembered combined with what is learned to become something new—all of us. And that’s what I sing.”
Wanda Houston and her band will be featured at the second annual “Benefit Bash” to support the work of the Becket Arts Center, Saturday, Sept. 1, at 8 p.m. at Papa Bob’s, 71 Chester Road in Becket. Tickets are $30 per couple and $20 for a single seat. Call (413) 623-6635 to reserve.