Life and career

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. 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 used to serenade 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 in the Depression days.

When Starks' 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, which he did not have. Venuti's road manager heard Kay Starr on the radio and suggested her to Venuti. She was still in junior high school and her parents insisted on a midnight curfew.

Although 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), she spent most of her 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 more appropriate for Marion Hutton that, unfortunately, did not suit Kay's vocal range.

After finishing high school, she moved to Los Angeles and signed with Wingy Manone's band; then from 1943 to 1945 she sang with Charlie Barnet's band. She then retired for a year because she developed pneumonia and later developed nodes on her vocal cords, and lost her voice as a result of fatigue and overwork.

A singer ... is no more than an actor set to music.

Kay Starr, 1967 interview

In 1946 she became a soloist, and in 1947 signed a solo contract with Capitol Records. Capitol had a number of other female singers signed up (such as Peggy Lee, Ella Mae Morse, Jo Stafford, and Margaret Whiting), so it was hard to find her a niche. In 1948 when the American Federation of Musicians was threatening a strike, Capitol wanted to have all its singers record a lot of songs for future release. Since she was junior to all these other artists, every song she wanted to sing got offered to all the others, leaving her a list of old songs from earlier in the century, which nobody else wanted to record.

Around 1950 Starr made a trip back home to Dougherty and heard a fiddle recording of Pee Wee King's song, "Bonaparte's Retreat". She liked it so much that she wanted to record it, and contacted Roy Acuff's publishing house in Nashville, Tennessee, and spoke to Acuff directly. He was happy to let her record it, but it took a while for her to make clear that she was a singer, not a fiddler, and therefore needed to have some lyrics written. Eventually Acuff came up with a new lyric, and "Bonaparte's Retreat" became her biggest hit up to that point, with close to a million sales.

In 1955, she signed with RCA Victor Records. However, at this time, rock-and-roll was displacing the existing forms of pop music and Kay had only two hits, the aforementioned which is sometimes considered her attempt to sing rock and roll and sometimes as a song poking fun at it, "The Rock And Roll Waltz". She stayed at RCA Victor until 1959, hitting the top ten only once more with "My Heart Reminds Me", then returned to Capitol.

Most of her songs have jazz influences, and, like those of Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray, are sung in a style that sound decidedly close to the rock and roll songs that follow. These include her smash hits "Wheel of Fortune" (her biggest hit, number one for 10 weeks), "Side by Side", The Man Upstairs, and "Rock and Roll Waltz". One of her biggest hits was her version of "(Everybody's Waitin' For) The Man with the Bag", a Christmas song that quickly became a holiday favorite. The song has remained popular over the years and has been covered by many artists to include Vonda Shepard, who performed the song on an Ally McBeal episode of the same name.

After rock-and-roll swept older performers from the charts, Starr subsequently appeared in such television series as NBC's Club Oasis, mostly associated with the bandleader Spike Jones. However, Starr recorded several albums, including Movin’ (1959), an up-tempo jazz album. Others included Losers, Weepers… (1960) and I Cry By Night (1962) in the jazz/blues genre, as well as a country album entitled Just Plain Country (1962).

After departing from Capitol Records for a second time in 1966, Starr continued touring concert venues in the US and the UK. She also recorded several jazz and country albums on small independent labels, including a 1968 album with Count Basie, How About This and Back to the Roots (1975). In the late 1980s she was featured in the revue 3 Girls with Helen O'Connell and Margaret Whiting, and in 1993 she toured the United Kingdom as part of Pat Boone’s April Love Tour. Her first "live" album, Live At Freddy's, was released in 1997. Kay Starr performs "Blue and Sentimental" with Tony Bennett on his 2001 album Playin' with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues.

In 2006 a remix by Stuhr of Starr's vocal of the classic "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" was used in a commercial for Telus. Additionally, a remixed version of "It's a Good Day" was used in a 2014 commercial spot for HomeGoods.

As of 2007 she resides in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles; married six times, she has a daughter and a grandchild.

Starr was one of the first female artists to perform country western swing music. As of 2015, she is now 93 years old and still performing.

Chart hits

Year	Single	Chart positions
		US	US AC	CB	UK
1948	"You Were Only Foolin' (While I Was Falling in Love)"	16
1949	"So Tired"	7
	"How It Lies, How It Lies, How It Lies"	28
1950	"Game of Broken Hearts"			26
	"Hoop-de-Doo"	2		4
	"Bonaparte's Retreat"	4		7
	"Mississippi"	18
	"I'll Never Be Free" A	3		7
	"Ain't Nobody's Business But My Own"B	22		31
	"Oh! Babe"	7		8
1951	"Ocean of Tears"	15		26
	"You're My Sugar"	22
	"Come On-A My House"	8		1
	"Angry"	26
1952	"Wheel of Fortune"	1		1
	"I Waited a Little Too Long"	20		22
	"Kay's Lament"	18		17
	"Fool, Fool, Fool"	13		22
	"Comes A-Long A-Love"	9		20	1
	"Three Letters"	22		28
1953	"Side by Side"	3		9	7
	"Half A Photograph"	7		12
	"Allez-Vous-En"	11		7
	"When My Dreamboat Comes Home"	18		35
	"Swamp Fire"	30		28
	"Changing Partners"	7			4
1954	"The Man Upstairs"	7		8
	"If You Love Me (Really Love Me)"	4		5
	"Am I A Toy Or A Treasure"	22		22	17
	"Fortune in Dreams"	17		24
1955	"Turn Right"			23
	"If Anyone Finds This, I Love You"			44
	"Foolishly Yours"			25
	"Good and Lonesome"	17		40
1956	"The Rock And Roll Waltz"	1		1	1
	"I've Changed My Mind A Thousand Times"	73
	"Second Fiddle"	40		37
	"Love Ain't Right"	89
	"Things I Never Had"	89
	"The Good Book"	89
1957	"Jamie Boy"	54		36
	"A Little Loneliness"	73		52
	"My Heart Reminds Me"	9		16
1958	"Stroll Me"			54
1959	"Riders In the Sky"			125
1961	"Foolin' Around"	49		57
	"I'll Never Be Free"	94		91
	"Nobody"			tag
	"Well I Ask Ya"			104
1962	"Four Walls"	92		119
1965	"Never Dreamed I Could Love Somebody New"		23
1966	"Tears and Heartaches"		19
	"Old Records"		26
1968	"When the Lights Go On Again (All Over the World)"		24	120
1974	"Tie a Yellow Ribbon"

• A peaked at #2 on Hot Country Songs charts
• B Peaked at #5 on Hot Country Songs charts

[ Source: Wikipedia ]