OPEN POST: Kickin' It With Kay Starr!

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I stan Miss Starr! And I think you will, too. A jazz vocalist's jazz vocalist, Kay Starr was "the only white woman who could sing the blues" according to Billie Holiday, who adored her, as did fellow artists like Tony Bennett, Dinah Washington, Les Paul, Patsy Cline and Count Bassie. It's not hard to see, or rather hear, why. Though Starr is largely forgotten by mainstream jazz vocal devotees, her smooth, yet hard-living, vocal delivery always feels genuine. 

Of her own singing, she once said, “People who haven’t seen me think I’m either a 260-pound peroxide blond or a 260-pound Black woman. Whites sing one-two-three-four. I sing between the beat, in the cracks, any old way. I run the gamut from hillbilly to jazz to just plain ballads. And if I sing them well, I attribute that to the fact that I grew up as a kid singing lots of hillbilly stuff. Contrary to what people say, it's a hard style to sing and it made my voice flexible. The nicest compliment ever paid to me was when I was told that I sing like a fellow playing an instrument. That and when Bob Crosby said, ‘You sound like you’ve been raised on bathtub gin.'"

She's due for a serious reappraisal, much like Anita O'Day received (and deserved) shortly before her death. "Goin To Chicago Blues," a fantastic track on "Movin'," her comeback LP from 1959, is a good example of her brassy, Memphis-meets-jazz stylings. Like many of her era, her mass-market career was cut short by the arrival of rock 'n roll, but she kept performing in Europe, occasionally in Vegas, as well as supper clubs and nightspots throughout the U.S.

Her personal life was rocky, though she never complained. "Yes, I've been married a number of times," she once said. "I'm not proud at my age to be turned out in the traffic again. I said I was going to do it until I got it right, but I haven't been able to. Every step you take is a lesson. I have only a few kinfolk. I was an only child, I have an only child, and she has an only child. But we're very closely knit."

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