INDIGENOUS

This week’s Phantom Dancer feature artist with Greg Poppleton, is indigenous US jazz singer, Kay Starr. She began singing on radio as a child and we hear her this week aged 22 singing with Benny Goodman and Charlie Barnet’s orchestras.

ONLINE

This week’s Phantom Dancer will be online after the 5 November 107.3 2SER Sydney live mix at 2ser.com.
Hear the show live every Tuesday 12:04-2pm on 107.3 2SER Sydney.

KAY

Katherine Laverne Starks, known professionally as Kay Starr, was a name jazz, pop, and country singer in the 1940s-50s. (She was the original singer of the Roy Acuff song, ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat. Her roots were in jazz and Billie Holiday called her ‘the only white woman who could sing the blues.’

CHICKENS

Her aunt Nora was impressed by her 7-year-old niece’s singing and arranged for her to sing on a Dallas radio station, WRR, vocal competition. Starr finishing 3rd one week in a talent contest and placed first every week thereafter. She was given a 15-minute radio show. She sang pop and country songs with a piano accompaniment. By age 10 she was making $3 a night, which was quite a salary during the Great Depression.

WESTERN

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

VENUTI

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 although she was young and her parents insisted on a midnight curfew.

BIG BANDS

At 17, in 1939, she worked with Bob Crosby and Glenn Miller, who hired her to replace the ill Marion Hutton. With Miller she recorded ‘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 Hutton, did not suit Kay’s vocal range.

After finishing high school, she moved to Los Angeles and signed with Wingy Manone’s band. From 1943 to 1945 she sang with Charlie Barnet’s ensemble, which we’ll hear on this week’s show, retiring for a year after contracting pneumonia and later developing nodes on her vocal cords as a result of fatigue and overwork.

VIDEO

This week’s Phantom Dancer video of the week is the 1952 hit song ‘Wheel of Fortune’ sung on the Your Hit Parade TV show.

19 NOVEMBER PLAY LIST