Bobby McFerrin

Bobby McFerrin (born March 11, 1950, Manhattan, New York, U.S.) is an American musician noted for his tremendous vocal control and improvisational ability. He often sings a cappella, mixing folk songs, 1960s rock and soul tunes, and jazz themes with original lyrics. He prefers to sing without fixed lyrics, and he can imitate the sounds of various musical instruments with great skill.

McFerrin’s parents both had distinguished vocal careers. His mother, a soprano, was a Metropolitan Opera judge who chaired the vocal department at Fullerton College, near Los Angeles, and his father, who sang at the Met, dubbed actor Sidney Poitier’s singing on the 1959 Porgy and Bess sound track. In McFerrin’s youth he was inclined to become a minister of music, but, after attending California State University at Sacramento and Cerritos College in Norwalk, California, he instead became a pianist and organist with the Ice Follies ice-skating show and with pop music bands. In 1977 he auditioned for and won a singing job. As a swinging jazz and ballad vocalist, by 1980 McFerrin was touring with popular jazz singer Jon Hendricks. Inspired by Keith Jarrett’s improvised piano concerts, in 1982 he worked up the nerve to sing alone.

McFerrin issued his self-titled debut album in 1982, and it was followed by The Voice (1984), which is unusual because it features no accompaniment; Spontaneous Inventions (1985), which features music by Herbie Hancock and Manhattan Transfer; and Simple Pleasures (1988), which features the hit song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” He also recorded television commercials and a theme song for The Cosby Show; improvised music for actor Jack Nicholson’s readings of Rudyard Kipling’s children’s stories; and released an album with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, titled Hush, in 1992.

McFerrin is perhaps best known for his spontaneity; in concert he might wander through the auditorium singing, make up songs on listeners’ names, conduct his audience in choirs, or burst into a condensed version of The Wizard of Oz, complete with tornado sounds and munchkin, witch, and scarecrow voices. On record he can improvise all the parts in a vocal group himself, as he did in “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” In 1995 McFerrin released Paper Music, an album he collaborated on with the St. Paul (Minnesota) Chamber Orchestra that features orchestral works by Mozart, Bach, Rossini, and other masters, with the melodies sung instead of played.

By the beginning of the 21st century, McFerrin’s work had garnered 10 Grammy Awards. His later recordings include Circlesongs (1997) and VOCAbuLarieS (2010), for which he drew from various world-music traditions to create minimally accompanied, harmonically rich choral pieces; the impressionistic jazz album Beyond Words (2002); and Spirityouall (2013), an homage to African American spirituals. In 2020 the National Endowment for the Arts named McFerrin a Jazz Master, and in 2024 the U.S. Library of Congress added a 1988 recording of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”