Sheila Tracy studied piano, violin and trombone at the Royal Academy of Music before joining the Ivy Benson All Girls Band. She then formed a vocal/trombone duo called The Tracy Sisters, appearing in variety, on radio and television, as well as in cabaret all over the world.

When the act broke up, Sheila joined BBC Television as an announcer and worked mostly in television until the mid 1970s when she became the first woman to read the News on Radio 4.

On Radio Two she devised and presented the Truckers Hour and has introduced Big Band Special since its inception in 1979. In 1992 Sheila presented the Band on its concert tour of America. She was also a regular contributor to Radio 4's Breakaway.

Bands, Booze & Broads, a collection of her interviews with the American sidemen who played with the top bands in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, was published in 1995 and is now available in paperback. Her follow up on the British bands of the same era, Talking Swing, was published in 1997, the year in which she was made a Freeman of the City of London and an A.R.A.M. Sheila is a former President of the British Trombone Society.