Johnny Hartman

Born in Louisiana but raised in Chicago, Hartman began singing and playing the piano by the age of eight. He attended DuSable High School studying music under Walter Dyett before receiving a scholarship to Chicago Musical College. He sang as an Army private during World War II, but his first professional work came in September 1946 when he won a singing contest awarding him a one-week engagement with Earl Hines. Seeing potential in the singer, Hines hired him for the next year. Although Hartman's first recordings were with Marl Young in February 1947, it was the collaboration with Hines that provided notable exposure. After the Hines orchestra broke up, Dizzy Gillespie invited Hartman to join his big band in 1948 during an eight-week tour in California. Dropped from the band about one year later, Hartman worked for a short time with pianist Erroll Garner before going solo by early 1950.

After recording several singles with different orchestras, Hartman finally released his first solo album, Songs from the Heart, with a quintet for Bethlehem Records in 1955. Releasing two more albums with small labels, neither very successful, Hartman got a career-altering offer in 1963 to record with John Coltrane. The saxophonist likely remembered Hartman from a bill they shared at the Apollo Theater in 1950 and later said,

In the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, the traffic triangle formed by Amsterdam Avenue, Hamilton Place, and West 143rd Street was designated by the New York City Council in 1984 as Johnny Hartman Plaza.

In the early 1980s Hartman gave several performances for jazz festivals, television, and radio before succumbing to lung cancer at the age of sixty. His reputation with a new generation grew considerably in 1995 when the soundtrack to Clint Eastwood's Bridges of Madison County (1995) featured four songs from the then out-of-print Once in Every Life album.

A biography, The Last Balladeer: The Johnny Hartman Story by Dr. Gregg Akkerman, was published in June 2012 by Scarecrow Press as part of their "Studies in Jazz" series.

On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Johnny Hartman among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.