Carol Douglas

Carol Douglas (born April 7, 1948) is an American singer whose hit "Doctor's Orders" (1974) was a pioneering track in the disco genre.

Carol Douglas was born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York City, United States. She is the daughter of Minnie Newsome, a jazz performer who has been cited as the inspiration for the Cab Calloway classic "Minnie the Moocher"; her father was a mortician. Sam Cooke was her cousin. At 10, Douglas was a contestant and winner on the game show Name That Tune and says "Ebony followed my career for the next three years."

She attended the Willard May School for professional children and afterwards the Quintanos High School for young professionals alongside Gregory Hines, Bernadette Peters, Carol Lynley, and Patty Duke. While in high school Douglas sang in a female trio named April May & June, who were signed as a management client by Little Anthony and the Imperials. She made a one-off recording in 1965 for RCA Victor, cutting the single "I Don't Mind (Being Your Fool)" under the name Carolyn Cooke: becoming pregnant with her first son at age 15 ended RCA's interest in promoting her.

Douglas also cut several jingles for TV commercials – " used to do voiceovers for Ideal Toys and General Mills with Bernadette Peters" – but recalls: "I never thought I would be a singer," and for most of the 1960s Douglas pursued an acting career, appearing in an episode of The Patty Duke Show but mostly acting in theatrical productions beginning with One Tuesday Morning starring Clarice Taylor. Later Douglas understudied Jonelle Allen in the off-Broadway production of The Life of Mary McLeod Bethune and co-starred with James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson in the play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl.

She married "high school sweetheart" Ken Douglas in the mid-1960s and resumed her musical career in the early 1970s, touring nationally on the oldies circuit in a line-up of the Chantels, featuring original frontwoman Arlene Smith: with these Chantels, Douglas cut the single "Some Tears Fall Dry" for Capitol.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.