Nothing but blue skies: Susannah McCorkle in Venice, 1968.

The constant moves and parental laissez-faire were hard on Susannah. Resentful and lonely, she found escape bingeing on sweets and in books. She also became an acute observer of people. Lying on the floor listening to her mother's recordings of Broadway musicals, Susannah once told radio interviewer Terry Gross, she tried to understand the stories and to figure out why the people who were singing "were happy or why they were unhappy."

When McCorkle entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, she found a substitute family in the talented bohemians who put out the campus humor magazine, The Pelican. More important, she found a powerful new way to channel her turbulent feelings: by writing about them. Under the pseudonym Susan Savage, she turned out satires of campus life. Fluent in five languages and a gifted mimic, she regaled staff members with her impersonations of everyone, from Jeanne Moreau to Marcello Mastroianni, seen onscreen at the foreign-film clubs that were essential to sophisticated college campuses.

"She was funny and smart and curvy," says staff member Jon Carroll, now a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. "But she had no idea that she had a powerful effect on men. She wasn't being disingenuous -- any good news about herself was impossible to accept."

After her father's breakdown, she used money her parents had set aside for her graduate studies to go to Europe. There she wrote a devastatingly personal short story called "Ramona by the Sea" that Mademoiselle published in 1973 and later won an O. Henry award.

An Italian-literature major, McCorkle picked up work dubbing films and translating. Expecting to become Europeanized, she instead discovered American movies and music, especially jazz. One day she heard a recording by Billie Holiday. On the spot, she decided to pursue a career as a jazz singer.

"It was pretty nervy for a white girl," says Glen Barros, president of Concord Records. "Lots of artists are doing it today, but in the seventies and into the eighties, it took a lot of guts." Undaunted, McCorkle got a job singing on an Italian cruise ship and made a stab at voice lessons -- despite the dismissive verdict of a famed Italian voice coach that she would "never be anything more than a microphone singer." Francesco Forti, a well-known clarinetist, helped her find work in Rome. Forti, a sophisticated and handsome man in his mid-forties, soon became her lover, but he was married, and in 1972, Susannah split for London.

Making her way around the clubs, McCorkle met her future accompanist, Keith Ingham, who had left Oxford and ancient Chinese literature to work as a jazz pianist. When Chris Ellis, then a junior producer at EMI, heard her sitting in with Ingham, he was stunned. "My jaw hit the floor," Ellis says. "There was this blonde American girl sounding like Billie Holiday. It was amazing." The only problem, he told her, was that there had already been a Billie Holiday. "You have to sound like yourself," he said. "I'll help you if you're willing to work, but you'll have to sweat."

She did. For the next year, she culled the American pop catalogue for music that suited her. She focused on the stories within the songs and paid attention to the words. Her phrasing and articulation, so precise and controlled (strangers sometimes asked if English was her native tongue), as well as the unpolished quality of her voice all became assets, lending familiar songs a fresh appeal.

"She attracted a lot of bright people," Ingham recalls. "She could take a circumstance that might be humiliating, like standing and singing on a chair or a milk carton in an after-hours club, and turn it into a plus, make it fun."

McCorkle's first solo recording, in 1976, was an album of songs by 42nd Street composer Harry Warren, who later told cabaret star Michael Feinstein that he liked her version of "Sweet and Slow" better than Ella Fitzgerald's. "Susannah captured the song's essence," Feinstein says. "She was wry and humorous and sexy and sad. That's a lot to pack into one piece."