Biography of kay starr
Collections Highlight: Kay Starr
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Kay Starr signed photograph. The Great American Songbook Foundation Library & Archives.
Born Katherine La Verne Starks on a reservation in Oklahoma, Kay Starr would become one of the most prolific voices of the 1940s and ’50s. She was known for incorporating the music of the American South and Southwest into her musical style. She grew up during the Great Depression and thrived during the start of the rock and roll era.
“I am a firm believer that a singer is no more than an actor or an actress set to music. They learn the story, they tell the story, and if they don’t tell the story right, people are not going to like it no matter what the melody is.”
― Kay Starr
Kay Starr Headshot. Public Domain.
Starr was born to her father, Henry, an Iroquois Native American, and Annie, who was of mixed Irish and Native American heritage. Her father worked for the Automatic Sprinkler Company while her mother raised chickens. As a young girl, Starr liked to serenade the coop. Her singing abilities won her a 15-minute radio show on Dallas station WRR. On her show, Starr would sing pop and country songs with piano accompaniment. By age 10, she was making $3 per night, a generous paycheck for the Great Depression.
When Starr’s father moved the family to Memphis, young Kay continued her radio performances, singing mostly the Western swing genre. American singer (1922–2016) Kay Starr Publicity photo, c. 1950s Musical artist Kay Starr (born Catherine Laverne Starks; July 21, 1922 – November 3, 2016) was an American singer who enjoyed considerable success in the late 1940s and 1950s. She was of Iroquois and Irish heritage. Starr performed multiple genres, such as pop, jazz, and country, but her roots were in jazz. 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. She would later claim to be both Cherokee and Choctaw descent. At the age of three, the Starks family moved to Dallas, Texas, where her father obtained a job installing building sprinklers. Her mother raised chickens to support the family as well. Catherine began singing during early childhood, often performing to the chickens that her mother was raising. She sang frequently around the house which caught the attention of her aunt, with whose help she took part in a local talent contest and won at the age of seven. Young Catherine continued to enter talent contests, and eventually landed a spot performing on Dallas's WRR radio station. She performed two times a week and earned three dollars a performance. The Starks family moved to Memphis, Tennessee when she was 15 and was given her own "Starr Segment" on Memphis's WREC station. Due to many people incorrectly s Born Katherine La Verne Starks on a reservation in Oklahoma, Kay Starr was raised in Texas and Tennessee and absorbed many of the musical styles popular in the American South and Southwest. She typically identified herself as Native American (Choctaw, Cherokee, and Iroquois)—along with what one newspaper described as “a small but potent flow of Irish.” According to a syndicated article about her published in 1964, the family lived on about $8 a week during the Depression. Starr was a precocious young musician, regularly heard live on the radio in Dallas, Fort Worth, and later in Memphis. Initially, she billed herself as a “hillbilly” singer and performed country and western swing—genres that she would return to throughout her career. When she was fifteen, jazz violinist and bandleader Joe Venuti hired her as a “girl singer.” Starr proved to be a versatile singer, which contributed to her success. She performed and recorded with the likes of Glenn Miller and Charlie Barnet into the 1940s, worked with Les Paul, and made records with Tennessee Ernie Ford in the 1950s. Perhaps due in part to an illness and treatment for nodules that had somewhat altered her vocal timbre by 1945, Capitol Records increasingly began marketing Starr as a “blues” singer. Articles from the early fifties describe Starr as white, but with qualifications: “Coon-Shouting Indian Singer Hits Jackpot in Jukeboxes,” proclaimed one headline in 1952. The article, an AP wire story printed in hundreds of papers, introduced Starr as a “buxom Indian lass who can’t read a note of music,” called her the “white Bessie Smith,” and labeled her style “gutbucket.” It neither the first nor the last story to imply that Starr’s heritage was the reason for her success in the blues. Another syndicated column from January 1951 praised Starr’s ability to succeed in a black genre that had “[eluded] white singers.” The reporter describes her sound as a fusion of Bessie Smith and jazz singer Mildred Bailey, t Kay Starr Native Oklahoman Katherine “Kay” Laverne Starks moved with her family to towns in Texas and Tennessee and began her singing career at the age of eight. She was only thirteen when she began singing for a daily radio show in Tennessee. She worked there several summers before performing with Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys at the Grand Ole Opry and singing with Bob Crosby and Frank Sinatra. She recorded an album with Glenn Miller’s orchestra when she was only fifteen and performed at military bases with Charlie Barnett’s band throughout World War II. She received her first Gold Record with the hit “Wheel of Fortune” in the 1950’s and later, sang such hits as “The Lonesomest Gal in Town,” “Angry,” “Rock and Roll Waltz,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” and “Side by Side.” She was a regular guest on the “Danny Thomas Show”, toured with Annie Get Your Gun, and starred in the movie, The Lord Don’t Play Favorites with Robert Stack and Buster Keaton. She and Frank Sinatra were awarded the “Hit Parader’s #1 Male and Female Entertainers” and she became Oklahoma’s Ambassador of Goodwill in 1985. Kay Starr auditioned only once during her entire career. At the audition, she had no music and said, “If I don’t know the words, I’ll make’em up. If you have someone to write the music, I’ll sing it.” She sang for thirty minutes and got the job. Starr was born on an Indian Reservation in Daugherty, Oklahoma.Kay Starr
Birth name Catherine Laverne Starks Born (1922-07-21)July 21, 1922
Dougherty, Oklahoma, U.S.Died November 3, 2016(2016-11-03) (aged 94)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.Genres Traditional pop, jazz, country, western swing Occupation Singer Labels Capitol, RCA Victor, Happy Tiger, His Master's Voice Early life
Career
“I like the songs that have to do with life. It has always been my theory that a singer, male or female, is no more than an actor or actress set to music. They are only as good as the stories they tell.”
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