- Jazz and bop harpist in clubs in Philadelphia, New York, and Detroit, daughter of Wiley Thompson, a jazz guitarist. She studied piano and music education at Wayne State University and performed with Louis Armstrong and Woody Herman. She was a bandleader of trios and quartets which included Frank Wess, Roy Haynes, Jimmy Cobb, and many others between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s. In the early 1960s she was host of a radio program in Detroit, and in the mid-1970s, after moving to California, she played in studio orchestras on albums by Sonny Criss and Stanley Turrentine. She also worked in theater pit orchestras conducted by her husband, John Ashby.
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