Jean Terrell

Velma Jean Terrell (born November 26, 1944) is an American R&B and jazz singer. She replaced Diana Ross as the lead singer of the Supremes in 1970.

Terrell was born on November 26, 1945, in Belzoni, Mississippi, United States. She was born into a family of 10 children, and her father was a Mississippi sharecropper. When Terrell was a child, the family moved north when her father found employment in Chicago factories.

She is the sister of the former WBA heavyweight boxing champion Ernie Terrell, who fought Muhammad Ali.

Before her career with the Supremes, she sang with her brother Ernie in the group Ernie Terrell and the Knockouts (sometimes the Heavyweights).

Motown president Berry Gordy discovered Terrell in 1969 in Miami, where she was performing with her brother at a club. Gordy was seeking a replacement for Diana Ross, who was leaving the group she had fronted during most of the 1960s, the Supremes, for a solo career. Gordy first signed Terrell to Motown as a solo artist but decided to join her with the Supremes as Ross's replacement alongside Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong, as announced in 1969.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.