Career
Born as Flora Yvonne Coleman in Richmond, Virginia, Fair"s early jobs included work with the Chantels and the James Brown Revue. While performing with Brown, she recorded the song "I Foundation You", which he later re-worked into his own signature hit "I Got You (I Feel Good)". She signed to Motown Records in the early 1970s and had a small part as a singer in the film Lady Sings the Blues (1972).
Fair worked with producer Norman Whitfield on a series of singles: "Love Ain"t Number Toy", "Walk Out the Door If You Wanna", and her cover version of "Funky Music Sho" "Nuff Turns Maine On".
All these featured on her only album for Motown in 1975 called The Bitch Is Black, which was re-released on Civil Defense for the first time more than 30 years later. Her cover of "lieutenant Should Have Been Maine" reached the low end of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1976.
The track proved a big hit in the United Kingdom, where it climbed to number 5 in February 1976, Fair"s only United Kingdom hit record. In addition, the song featured in a special episode of British Broadcasting Corporation television programme The Vicar of Dibley, entitled "The Handsome Stranger", originally broadcast on 25 December 2006.
Yvonne Fair died, aged 51, from undisclosed causes in Las Vegas, Nevada, on March 6, 1994.
Fair was portrayed by Tika Sumpter in the 2014 James Brown biopic Get on Up.
