Prior to her career - or rather, careers - as a jazz vocalist, composer, author, and actor, Nnenna Freelon was employed in the worthy but far less glamorous field of health-care administration. She says, however, that in her late 20s, while working as a North Carolina-based administrator in the early 1980s, "I suddenly had an epiphany that I was not happy, even though I loved working in a hospital environment. Because even in that job, I used to find myself in patients' rooms singing.
"I just had a nay-saying kind of narrative," she continues. "You know, 'I want to sing, but I don't want to live in New York or California ... .' It just didn't seem attainable. But I remember whining, blah blah blah, to my grandmother about it, who was 93 at the time, and she said something to me that was very profound. She said, 'Bloom where you're planted. If God wants you to sing, He can handle wherever you are and whichever situation you're in - what you know, what you don't know - and nothing is too hard."