Nancy Wilson was an American vocalist, born Nancy Sue Wilson on February 20, 1937, in Chillicothe, Ohio, who rose from the Columbus club circuit to become one of Capitol Records' best-selling singers of the 1960s and, late in life, an NEA Jazz Master (she is not the Heart guitarist of the same name). Her father, Olden Wilson, worked in an iron foundry, and her mother was Lillian Ryan. She sang in church choirs as a child, and she found jazz in her father's record collection, where Jimmy Scott, Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, Dinah Washington and Ruth Brown were among the singers. At West High School in Columbus she was offered a twice-weekly local television spot of her own, and she was working the city's clubs by fifteen, including a long stay at the Club Regal. On her prom night she sat in with the saxophonist Rusty Bryant's band at the Club Caroline; Bryant turned up at her house the next day to ask her father whether she could tour with him, and after a stretch at Central State University in Wilberforce she joined his band in 1956 for Midwest dates. Along the way she sat in with Cannonball Adderley, who told her to try New York.

She moved to New York in 1959, working days as a secretary at the New York Institute of Technology and singing at night, and within weeks she was filling in for the singer Irene Reid at the Blue Morocco in the Bronx. John Levy, a former bassist whose clients included George Shearing, Ramsey Lewis, Ahmad Jamal and Dakota Staton, became her manager, and sides she cut in New York with a Ray Bryant trio went to the Capitol producer David Cavanaugh, who wanted nobody else to hear them. Her first two albums for the label, Like in Love (April 1960) and Something Wonderful (October 1960), were arranged and conducted by Billy May, and the second contained "Guess Who I Saw Today." The Swingin's Mutual! (March 1961) teamed her, on six tracks, with the George Shearing Quintet. Then came Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley, issued in February 1962 and recorded in New York in June and August 1961 with Adderley's quintet of cornetist Nat Adderley, pianist Joe Zawinul, bassist Sam Jones and drummer Louis Hayes. She sings on six of the eleven tracks, among them "Save Your Love for Me," "Never Will I Marry" and "A Sleepin' Bee," and the band plays the other five on its own. The album reached No. 30 on Billboard's album chart and remains the anchor of her jazz reputation; she returned to Adderley's quintet for "Save Your Love for Me" on its 1968 album In Person.

Her commercial rise followed quickly. Broadway - My Way and Hollywood - My Way (both 1963) used arrangements by Jimmy Jones, and Yesterday's Love Songs/Today's Blues, arranged by Gerald Wilson, entered the charts in January 1964 and peaked at No. 4. Her opening night at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles in 1964, which Time covered, was the night she later called the turning point of her career, and the engagement was recorded for the live album The Nancy Wilson Show! (1965). In 1964 "(You Don't Know) How Glad I Am" reached No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy Award for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording at the 1965 ceremony. Four of her albums reached the Billboard Top 10 between March 1964 and June 1965, and the National Endowment for the Arts notes that during her Capitol years only the Beatles outsold her; she made 37 original albums for the label. The bassist Buster Williams joined her in 1964 and recorded several Capitol albums with her, a partnership that took him to Los Angeles. She also starred in the NBC series The Nancy Wilson Show (1967 to 1968), which won an Emmy.

The late 1960s and the 1970s pulled her toward soul and pop, with chart singles such as "Face It Girl, It's Over" (1968, No. 29) and albums like Hurt So Bad and Now I'm a Woman, but jazz material kept returning. Lush Life (1967) used arrangements by Billy May, Oliver Nelson and Sid Feller, and But Beautiful (1971) set her with a quartet led by Hank Jones with Ron Carter, drummer Grady Tate and guitarist Gene Bertoncini. Her first marriage, to the drummer Kenny Dennis, lasted from 1960 to 1970; in 1974 she married the Rev. Wiley Burton and for two decades scaled back her supper-club work. In the 1980s, finding American labels reluctant to let her record live, she made several albums for Japanese companies. They include Aurex Jazz Festival '81, taken from concerts in Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama in September 1981 with the Great Jazz Trio and the guest soloists Art Farmer and Benny Golson; What's New, recorded live to two tracks in New York in September 1982 with Hank Jones, bassist Eddie Gomez and Jimmy Cobb; and Echoes of an Era 2, a concert recorded in Reseda, California, on April 7, 1982, with Joe Henderson, Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White. A set by her own trio with Farmer and Golson from the June 1982 Playboy Jazz Festival was released in 1984, the year of The Two of Us, a duet album with Ramsey Lewis produced by Stanley Clarke.

From the mid-1990s she hosted NPR's Jazz Profiles, an artist-by-artist documentary series that won a Peabody Award, and in 1999 she hosted the A&E tribute Forever Ella. Her Columbia albums Love, Nancy (1994) and If I Had My Way (1997) each reached No. 6 on Billboard's jazz albums chart. In 2001 she made A Nancy Wilson Christmas for the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild's MCG Jazz label in Pittsburgh, with a big band under trumpeter Jon Faddis that included James Moody, Jimmy Heath, Slide Hampton and Frank Wess. She followed it with two albums with Ramsey Lewis for Narada Jazz, Meant to Be (2002) and Simple Pleasures (2003), and then with R.S.V.P. (Rare Songs, Very Personal) (2004) and Turned to Blue (2006), both for MCG Jazz and both winners of the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album, at the 2005 and 2007 ceremonies. She was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2004, had been inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1999, and was voted best jazz vocalist in Playboy's 1998 readers' poll. Her last public performance was on September 10, 2011, at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. She passed away at her home in Pioneertown, California, on December 13, 2018, at the age of 81.

Wilson resisted being filed under one label and preferred to be called a song stylist, and her catalog bears that out: supper-club standards, Broadway and film songbooks, and rhythm-and-blues and soul chart singles sit beside her jazz dates. The NEA nonetheless describes her as best known for her jazz performances, and the jazz institutions agree, from the NEA Jazz Masters fellowship and two Grammys for Best Jazz Vocal Album to the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame. In a 2007 NEA interview she named Jimmy Scott as the source of her sound, Dinah Washington as the model for her humor, and Lena Horne for her overall look, and she recalled hearing Sarah Vaughan in her mid-teens and hearing Carmen McRae sing "Guess Who I Saw Today" when she was very young; by her own account she had been singing the song for six years by the time she met her future manager John Levy. What she took from those singers, she said, was a clear delivery of the lyric, so that every word is understood and the song's story gets told. The Penguin Guide to Jazz found her phrasing self-conscious in places on the date with Cannonball Adderley but singled out "A Sleepin' Bee" as one of her most charming recordings. Obituaries named Patti LaBelle, Anita Baker and Nnenna Freelon among the singers she influenced.