Kay Starr: Jazz Singer of the 1950s
Kay Starr (July 21, 1922 – November 3, 2016) was an American singer who enjoyed considerable success in the late 1940s and 1950s. Her 1952 song “Wheel of Fortune” became her biggest hit, reaching No. 1 for 10 weeks and later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Early Life and Education
Catherine Laverne Starks was born in Dougherty, Oklahoma, to Annie and Harry Starks. Her mother’s ancestors were Irish-American, while her father was a Native American Iroquois. When she was three years old, the family moved to Dallas, Texas, where her father installed building sprinklers and her mother raised chickens. Catherine began singing during early childhood, often performing to the chickens. At age seven, she won a local talent contest with her aunt’s help.
Career and Achievements
Starr performed on Dallas’s WRR radio station twice a week, earning three dollars per performance. When the family moved to Memphis at age 15, she received her own “Starr Segment” on WREC station and adopted her stage name after people frequently mispronounced her surname. During high school, she worked with various country music bands and was discovered by jazz violinist Joe Venuti, who hired her to perform at the Peabody Hotel for two consecutive summers beginning in 1937.
Starr caught the attention of Bob Crosby’s manager and briefly performed with Crosby’s band in New York City before being dismissed for being considered “too earthy.” Glenn Miller then hired her as a substitute performer, and at age 16 she recorded her first tracks, “Baby Me” and “Love with a Capital ‘You’,” though these failed commercially. She returned to Memphis and completed high school in 1940, then moved to Los Angeles and worked with Venuti until 1941.
After singing with Wingy Manone’s band and Charlie Barnet’s ensemble from 1943 to 1945—a period interrupted by pneumonia and vocal cord nodes—Starr became a soloist in 1946 and signed with Capitol Records in 1947. In 1950, she recorded “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” which became her biggest hit to that point with close to a million sales. She signed with RCA Victor Records in 1955 and had hits including “The Rock and Roll Waltz” and “My Heart Reminds Me” before returning to Capitol in 1959.
Starr’s other major hits included “Allez-Vous-En” (from the Broadway show CAN-CAN), “If You Love Me (Really Love Me),” “Side by Side,” “The Man Upstairs,” and a version of “(Everybody’s Waitin’ For) The Man with the Bag” that became a holiday favorite. She performed in the television series Club Oasis, mostly associated with bandleader Spike Jones, and after leaving Capitol in 1966, continued touring in the US and UK, recording jazz and country albums on independent labels. In the late 1980s, she performed in the revue 3 Girls with Helen O’Connell and Margaret Whiting. Her first live album, Live at Freddy’s, was released in 1997, and she sang with Tony Bennett on his 2001 album Playin’ with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues.
Notable Events and Milestones
Starr was married six times, including briefly in 1953 to bandleader and composer Vic Schoen. She died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease in Los Angeles on November 3, 2016, at age 94, and was survived by a daughter.
Additional Resources
For more detailed information about Kay Starr’s life, career, and musical legacy, readers are encouraged to consult Wikipedia and other biographical archives dedicated to twentieth-century American music and entertainment history.
