She 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, the family moved to
Dallas, Texas. While her father worked for the Automatic Sprinkler Company, her mother raised chickens, and Kay used to sing to the
chickens in the
coop. As a result of the fact that her aunt, Nora, was impressed by her singing, she began to sing at the age of seven on a Dallas
radio station,
WRR, first in a talent competition where she finished third one week and won every week thereafter, then with her own weekly fifteen minute show. She sang
pop and
"hillbilly" songs with a piano accompaniment. By the age of ten, she was making $3 a night, a lot of money in the
Depression days.
As a result of her father's changing jobs, her family moved to
Memphis, Tennessee, and she continued performing on the
radio, singing "Western swing music," still mostly a mix of
country and
pop. It was while she was on the Memphis radio station
WMPS that, as a result of misspellings in her fan mail, she and her parents decided to give her the name "Kay Starr".
Aged 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 her on the radio and suggested her to Venuti. Because she was still in junior high school, her parents insisted that Venuti take her home no later than midnight.
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 record: "Baby Me"/"Love with a Capital You." It was not a great success, in part because the band played in a key more appropriate for Marion Hutton, which was less suited for 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.
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, traditional pop music was being superseded by
rock and roll, and Kay had only one hit, which is sometimes considered her attempt to sing rock and roll and sometimes as a song making fun of it,
The Rock And Roll Waltz. She stayed at RCA Victor until
1959, then returned to Capitol.
Most of her songs have jazz influences, and, like
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
cover version of
The Man with the Bag, a
Christmas song, which can be heard non-stop every holiday season in stores, restaurants, and on the radio. Her career declined in the late 1950s but she continued to work.
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.
As of
2007 she resides in
Bel Air, California; married six times she has a daughter and a grandchild.
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