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Kay Starr

Katherine Laverne Starks, known as Kay Starr, was an American pop and jazz singer who enjoyed considerable success in the 1940s and 1950s. She is best remembered for introducing two songs that became #1 hits in the 1950s, "Wheel of Fortune" and "The Rock And Roll Waltz".

Starr was successful in every field of music she tried: jazz, pop and country. But her roots were in jazz; and Billie Holiday, considered by many the greatest jazz singer of all time, called Starr "the only white woman who could sing the blues."

Kay Starr was born Katherine Laverne Starks on a reservation in Dougherty, Oklahoma. Her father, Harry, was a full-blooded Iroquois Indian; her mother, Annie, was of mixed Irish and American Indian heritage.[2] When her father got a job installing water sprinkler systems for the Automatical Sprinkler Company, the family moved to Dallas, Texas. There, her mother raised chickens, whom Kay serenaded in the coop. Kay's aunt Nora was impressed by her 7-year-old niece's singing and arranged for her to sing on a Dallas radio station, WRR. First she took a talent competition by storm, finishing 3rd one week and placing first every week thereafter. Eventually she had her own 15-minute show. She sang pop and "hillbilly" songs with a piano accompaniment. By age 10 she was making $3 a night, which was quite a salary during the Great Depression.

When Starr's father changed jobs, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she continued performing on the radio. She sang "Western swing music," still mostly a mix of country and pop. During this time at Memphis radio station WMPS, misspellings in her fan mail inspired her and her parents to change her name to Kay Starr.

At 15, she was chosen to sing with the Joe Venuti orchestra. Venuti had a contract to play in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis which called for his band to feature a girl singer, a performer he did not have at the time. Venuti's road manager heard Starr on the radio and recommended her to his boss although she was still in junior high school and her parents insisted on a midnight curfew.

Though she had brief stints in 1939 with Bob Crosby and Glenn Miller (who hired her in July of that year when his regular singer, Marion Hutton, was sick), Starr spent most of the next few years with Venuti until he dissolved his band in 1942. It was, however, with Miller that she cut her first two recordings: "Baby Me" and "Love with a Capital You". They were not a great success, in part because the band played in a key that, while appropriate for Marion Hutton, did not suit Kay's vocal range.

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First Time I Saw

Kay Starr

Read "Kay Starr" reviewed by Carol Sloane


It was probably on a popular television variety program such as The Ed Sullivan Show. Or it could have been the cover of a magazine I bought faithfully once a month which contained all the lyrics to the popular songs of the day. I was just fourteen years old in 1951, and Kay Starr had a huge hit record which played constantly on the radio. It was called “The Wheel of Fortune," and I can still hear her voice at ...

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Recording

Count Basie and Kay Starr

Count Basie and Kay Starr

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

Count Basie fans tend to focus on his hard-driving “Super Chief" bands of the 1940s and his stylistic “New Testament" bands of the 1950s. And rightly so. But often overlooked is Basie's output during the 1960s, when he recorded more than 30 albums, many of them slam-bang swingers. Coming off his Roulette Records contract in the summer of 1962, Basie began to record for Reprise, starting with his first album with Frank Sinatra in October '62. Then he alternated between ...

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Obituary

Bob Cranshaw + Kay Starr

Bob Cranshaw + Kay Starr

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

Bob Cranshaw (1932-2016), a Chicago-born jazz bassist who began recording in 1957 and became a significant force in the 1960s starting with Sonny Rollins' seminal album, The Bridge, in 1962, died on Nov. 2. He was 83. At a time when even the best jazz bassists seemed interchangeable to the average listener, Bob's playing stood out with sensitivity and grace. It has been said that while jazz groups play for audiences, bassists play for the soloist, serving largely as inventive ...

Recording

Kay Starr: 'I Cry by Night'

Kay Starr: 'I Cry by Night'

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

Like many gifted singers of her generation, Kay Starr wound up a hard-boiled pop vocalist. When the LP era took hold in the early 1950s and the 12-inch LP appeared mid-decade with the ability to support a  color photo on the jacket cover, many female singers with jazz and big-band chops chomped down on the commercial bit and hauled in wagon-loads of popular music recordings. The list is too long to cite in full here, but we certainly can includes ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

The Fabulous Kay Starr

Bourbon Records
2004

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Jazz Singer / The...

Bourbon Records
2002

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Rockin' With Kay / I...

Bourbon Records
2002

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The One - The Only /...

Bourbon Records
2002

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Capitol Collectors...

Bourbon Records
1991

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Greatest Hits

Bourbon Records
1991

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