"Sonny" Burgess (May 28, 1929 – August 18, 2017) was an American rockabilly guitarist and singer.
Albert Austin Burgess was born near Newport, Arkansas, about 60 miles west of Memphis. His parents, Albert Austin and the former Esta Parsley, ran a cotton and soybean farm. After graduating from Newport High School in 1948, he spent two years in baseball’s minor leagues but could not hit a curveball. Giving up on a baseball career, he formed a country band, the Rocky Road Ramblers, with three friends, Kern Kennedy, Johnny Ray Hubbard, and Gerald Jackson and played boogie woogie music in dance halls and bars around Newport. He served in the Army (1951-1953) during the Korean War, stationed in West Germany with the military police. On his return to Arkansas, he reorganized the Ramblers into the Moonlighters, taking the name from the Silver Moon Club in Newport, where the group often played.
Burgess was a fan of the blues singers Jimmy Reed and Big Joe Turner and performed a mix of rhythm and blues and old standards, but in 1955 the group changed its sound after opening for Elvis Presley on four dates. “We heard Elvis and said, ‘Man, I want to go to Memphis and record and be like that,’ ” Mr. Burgess told Kicks magazine in 1988. Presley, in turn, liked the group’s version of Smiley Lewis’s “One Night of Sin,” which he recorded in 1958 as “One Night.” Adding a second guitar and trumpet and taking a new name, the Pacers, the group began recording at Sun with Sam Phillips, who encouraged Burgess to coarsen his vocal style and let loose, which he did.
The band's first record was "Red Headed Woman." The flip side was "We Wanna Boogie." Both were written by Burgess and delivered a straight shot of full-tilt rockabilly, with manic instrumental solos behind Mr. Burgess’s growling vocals, punctuated by whoops and shrieks and growls. “Here was total abandon: coarse, untutored singing; unintelligible lyrics; ragged drumming; distorted guitar, backed by a wildly bleating trumpet,” Colin Escott wrote in “Roadkill on the Three-Chord Highway: Art and Trash in American Popular Music” (2002). “It was punk before punk, thrash before thrash.”
The record was said to have sold nearly 100,000 copies, but Mr. Burgess, who wrote both songs, was unable to capitalize on its success. His later releases for Sun including “Thunderbird,” “Ain’t Got a Thing,” “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” and “Sadie’s Back in Town,” went nowhere. “Maybe Sonny’s sound was too raw, I don’t know — but I tell you this,” Phillips said in an interview for a boxed set of Sun recordings. “They were pure rock ’n’ roll.” In performance, the Pacers lived up to their sound. Inspired by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, whose stage antics had enlivened Bill Haley and the Comets’ movie “Rock Around the Clock,” they did splits and back flips onstage, formed a human pyramid and threw themselves into the audience at the end of every performance.
After leaving the Sun label in 1959 he scratched out a living playing bass and touring with the country singer Conway Twitty and performing with a variety of groups. After leaving Twitty in 1964, Burgess formed a new group, the King’s IV, but in 1972 he left the music business to run shoe store in Little Rock and also becoming a traveling salesman for St. Louis Trimming, a sewing-supply company. In 1986 he joined with former musicians from the Sun label to form the Sun Rhythm Section and was invited to a show in Washington DC where he made a big hit. After that, Burgess travelled all over the world and became a sensation in Europe. Due to his European fans, Mr. Burgess enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s, and recorded the albums Tennessee Border with Dave Alvin of the Blasters and Sonny Burgess with Garry Tallent of the E Street Band.
In 1998, the Smithsonian Institution made a video called “Rockin’ on the River” that brought Burgess and the Legendary Pacers together again. In addition to original member Kern Kennedy, the group now included Bobby Crafford, Jim Aldridge, Fred Douglas, J. C. Caughron, and Charles Watson II. They made two album-length recordings in the late 1990s: They Came from the South and Still Rockin’ and Rollin’ which in 2000, was voted the best new album in the country and roots field in Europe. The group was inducted in 2002 into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. They also performed at the 2006 National Folk Festival in Richmond, Virginia. With June Taylor, he was the host of “We Wanna Boogie,” a Sunday night show on KASU, the radio station of Arkansas State University, in Jonesboro. Burgess was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Arkansas State University in Jonesboro on May 7, 2011.
In 2014, he received the Delta Cultural Center’s Sonny Payne Award for Blues Excellence. Sonny Burgess and the Legendary Pacers were given the Folklife Award by the Arkansas Arts Council, presented at the Governor’s Arts Awards ceremony on March 10, 2016. That same year, in poor heath, he moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County). In July 2017, Burgess suffered a fall at his home. He died the following month in Little Rocks Arkansas hospital, at the age of 88.
He performed with his band, The Pacers, up until a month before he passed away. His legacy endures as a testament to his role in shaping the sound of rockabilly and influencing generations of musicians who followed.
(Edited from The New York Times, Wikipedia & Encyclopedia of Arkansas)
Henry Ellis Stewart (May 27, 1923 – August 4, 2003), better known as Redd Stewart, was an American country music songwriter and recording artist who co-wrote "Tennessee Waltz" with Pee Wee King in 1948.
Pee Wee & Redd
He was born the son of musical parents in Ashland City, Tennessee. Redd's family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, while he was still young. He learned to play the banjo, piano, fiddle and guitar as a child. All six of his brothers and sisters also became musicians. He dropped out of school after the seventh grade to perform in local bands. At age 14, he wrote his first commercial song, an ad jingle for a Louisville Ford automobile dealership. He also formed his own band at that time, the Kentucky Wildcats. He legally changed his name to Redd because of his russet-coloured hair.
In 1939, Redd Stewart became a member of Pee Wee King's band, the Golden West Cowboys, and joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. World War II. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Redd was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to the South Pacific. While stationed there with the rank of sergeant, Redd wrote "A Soldier's Last Letter," which Ernest Tubb worked on and recorded in 1944, making it a No. 1 hit staying at the top for four weeks out of a seven month stay on the Country charts and crossing over to the Pop chart Top 20.
When Redd returned to Pee Wee's Golden West Cowboys at the end of WW II, he became the band's vocalist, replacing Eddy Arnold who had gone solo. Most of the band's biggest hits were sung by Stewart. In 1946 he married Frances Jean Grimes. Stewart and King left the Opry and moved to Louisville in 1947. From there, they became pioneers in country music TV, starring in both regional and national programs.
When Stuart and King became a song writing team in the 1950s their first major success, "Bonaparte's Retreat," was Kay Starr's launch-pad to stardom They provided material to Eddy Arnold, Cowboy Copas and other country stars of the day. Their "Tennessee Waltz" became a pop smash for Patti Page in 1951 (reportedly selling more than 6 million copies)and was also covered by Roy Acuff, the Louvin Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and many others. It was also named a state song of Tennessee in 1965. "Slow Poke" was # 1 on both the country and pop charts for King & the Golden West Cowboys and was covered by Hawkshaw Hawkins. King and Stewart's romantic ballad "You Belong to Me," co-written with Chilton Price, topped the pop charts when recorded by Jo Stafford in 1952 and became a major doo-wop hit when revived by the Duprees a decade later.
Redd appeared in several movies with Pee Wee King, including Gold Mine in the Sky (1938), Ridin' the Outlaw Trail (1951) and The Rough, Tough West (1952), the last two starring Charles Starrett as the Durango Kid. In 1961, Redd and King appeared in the movie, Hoedown. In 1950–51, Stewart signed with King Records as a solo vocalist, though none of his singles were successful. Stewart also wrote songs that would be made famous by other artists. He provided Jim Reeves with "That's a Sad Affair", (Reeves also recorded "You Belong to Me") and Moon Mullican with "Downstream" and "When Love Dies Where Does it Go" in the mid-1950s. "Tennessee Waltz" In 1971 he married Darlene Iona Collins and in 1972, he was inducted as a charter member into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. During his lifetime, Redd Stewart estimated that he had written more than 400 songs.
On August 2, 2003, Stewart died at 80 at Baptist Hospital East in Louisville, from complications of injuries due to a fall at his home in Louisville, in the early 1990s. n 2004, "Tennessee Waltz" was awarded BMI's 3,000,000 Airplay Award. (equivalent to 17.1 years of continuous playing). In 2004, he was inducted into Country Legends Hall of Fame and the Traditional Country Music Hall of Fame; and in 2005, Tennessee Waltz Parkway opened in his birthplace, Ashland City.
(Edited from Wikipedia, Nashville Songwriters Foundation & IMDb)
Mamie Smith (née Robinson; May 26, 1883 or 1891 – August or September 16, 1946) was an American singer. As a vaudeville singer, she performed in multiple styles, including jazz and blues. In 1920, she entered blues history as the first African-American artist to make vocal blues recordings.
Robinson was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. The year of her birth has been given as 1883, but in 2018, researcher John Jeremiah Sullivan discovered her birth certificate stating she was born in Cincinnati in 1891. When she was around age 10, she found work touring with the Four Dancing Mitchells, a white act. As a teenager, she danced in Salem Tutt Whitney's Smart Set. In 1913, she left the Tutt Brothers and married William "Smitty" Smith, a singer. The couple moved to New York where she began working as a cabaret dancer, pianist and singer. Her first major break came in 1918, when she appeared in Perry Bradford’s musical Made in Harlem. She remarried twice after her career took off.
On February 14, 1920, Smith recorded "That Thing Called Love" and "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down" for the Okeh label in New York City, after African-American songwriter and bandleader Perry Bradford persuaded Fred Hager to break the colour barrier in black music recording. Okeh Records recorded many iconic songs by black musicians. Although this was the first recording by a black blues singer, the backing musicians were all white. Hager had received threats from Northern and Southern pressure groups saying they would boycott the company if he recorded a black singer. Despite these threats, the record was a commercial success and opened the door for more black musicians to record.
Smith's biggest hits were the August 10, 1920 recordings of a set of songs written by Perry Bradford, including "Crazy Blues" and "It's Right Here for You (If You Don't Get It, 'Tain't No Fault of Mine)", again for Okeh Records, A million copies were sold in less than a year. Many were bought by African Americans, and there was a sharp rise in sales of "race records". Because of its historical significance, "Crazy Blues" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1994 and was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2005. Although other African Americans had been recorded earlier, such as George W. Johnson in the 1890s, they were performing music that had a substantial following among European-American audiences. The success of Smith's record prompted record companies to seek to record other female blues singers and began the era of what is now known as classic female blues.
Smith continued to make popular recordings for Okeh throughout the 1920s. By this time she was married to her manager Ossey Wilson. In 1924, she made three releases for Ajax Records, which, while heavily promoted, did not sell well. She made some records for Victor. She toured the United States and Europe with the band Mamie Smith & Her Jazz Hounds as part of Mamie Smith's Struttin' Along Review. She was billed as "The Queen of the Blues", a billing soon one-upped by Bessie Smith, who was called "The Empress of the Blues". Mamie found that the mass medium of radio provided a means of gaining additional fans, especially in cities with predominantly white audiences. For example, she and several members of her band performed on KGW in Portland, Oregon in early May 1923 and received positive reviews. Because of her popularity Smith had many engagements, touring as far as New Orleans and Dallas and appearing as the featured singer in her own shows. She possessed a lively stage personality, was extremely attractive and had a strong voice.
Most of her best recordings were made with her Jazz Hounds whose line-ups included (from August 1920 to October 1921) Jake Green, Curtis Moseley, Garvin Bushell, Johnny Dunn, Dope Andrews, Ernest Elliot, Porter Grainger, Leroy Parker and Bob Fuller, and (from June 1922 to January 1923) Coleman Hawkins, Everett Robbins, Johnny Dunn, Herschel Brassfield, Herb Flemming, Buster Bailey Cutie Perkins, Joe Smith, Bubber Miley, and Cecil Carpenter. While recording with the Jazz Hounds, she recorded as Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Band, comprising George Bell, Charles Matson, Nathan Glantz, Larry Briers, Jules Levy, Jr., Joe Samuels, together with musicians from the Jazz Hounds, including Hawkins, Fuller and Carpenter.
Smith also became wealthy, as one of very few successful Black female performers. Her average fee was $1,000 ($13,000 today) for weekly performances. Between 1920 and 1931 she earned an estimated $100,000 ($1.3 M today) in royalties from the 95 songs recorded, 89 on OKeh and 6 on Victor. Her dresses were from New York and Paris and received as much attention as her singing. Fashion designer Madame Hammer created Mamie Smith’s stage gowns specifically, “fitting the individuality of the star and the various songs which she sings on her program.” Smith appeared in the early sound film Jailhouse Blues in 1929. Although Smith owned homes in New York City, a lavish wardrobe, gold securities, and one of the most splendid automobiles of the day, she lost most everything after the stock market crash.
She retired from recording and performing in 1931. She returned to performing in 1939 to appear in the movie Paradise in Harlem, produced by her husband, Jack Goldberg. She also appeared in other films, including Mystery in Swing (1940), Sunday Sinners (1940), Stolen Paradise (1941), Murder on Lenox Avenue (1941), and Because I Love You (1943). When she fell ill in 1944, she had few resources and was living in an Eighth Avenue boarding house. Severely arthritic, she entered Harlem Hospital that year and died there in 1946, bankrupt.
She was interred at Frederick Douglass Memorial Park on Staten Island, on ground which remained unmarked until 2013 when a monument was finally erected. Initially, according to the Jas Obrecht Music Archive website, Smith was buried in an unmarked grave until 1963 when musicians from Iserlohn, West Germany used the money from a Hot Jazz benefit to buy a headstone that read "Mamie Smith (1883–1946): First Lady of the Blues". With the help of fellow blues singer Victoria Spivey and Record Research Magazine publisher Len Kunstadt, Smith was re-interred at Frederick Douglass Memorial Park in Richmond, New York. Smith's re-interment was celebrated with a gala honouring the late singer on January 27, 1964. However, according to the 2012 campaign website, Mamie Smith still was buried without a headstone 67 years after her death in 1946.
A successful campaign to finally acquire and erect a headstone for Smith was begun in 2012 by Michael and Anne Fanciullo Cala. The couple, respectively a blues journalist and editor, developed a months-long crowdfunding campaign on the Indiegogo website to purchase a headstone for Smith. The philanthropy Music Cares also supported the effort. The campaign raised over $8,000 that funded the creation of a four-foot-high etched granite headstone featuring an image of the late blues singer. The monument was erected with great fanfare at Frederick Douglass Cemetery in Staten Island, New York on September 20, 2013. Excess funds from the campaign were donated to the cemetery for grounds care.
(Edited from Wikipedia, Friends of Music Hall & New Grove Dictionary of Jazz)
Ernest Van "Pop" Stoneman (May 25, 1893 – June 14, 1968) was an American musician, ranked among the prominent recording artists of country music's first commercial decade.
Born in a log cabin in Monarat (Iron Ridge), Carroll County, Virginia, United States, near what would later become Galax, Virginia, Stoneman was left motherless at age three and was raised by his father and three musically inclined cousins, who taught him the instrumental and vocal traditions of Blue Ridge Mountains culture. He became a singer and songwriter, and proficient musician on the guitar, autoharp, harmonica, clawhammer banjo, and jaw harp. When he married Hattie Frost in November 1918, he entered another musically involved family. Hattie and he had 23 children, 13 of whom survived to adulthood, including Calvin Scott (Scotty) (died 1973), and Veronica Loretta (Roni) (died 2024).
Stoneman worked at a variety of jobs, in mines, mills, but mostly carpentry, and played music for his own enjoyment and that of his neighbors, but when he heard a Henry Whitter record in 1924, he determined to better it and changed his life. Stoneman went to New York City in September 1924 and cut two songs for the Okeh Records label. The record was shelved and he had to return for another recording session in January 1925. The resultant debut single release, "Sinking of the Titanic", went on to become one of the biggest hits of the 1920s. One historian noted that the recording sold over two million copies. Ralph Peer directed him through several sessions for Okeh and Victor, and he freelanced on other labels such as Edison, Gennett, and Paramount Records. In 1926, he added family musicians to his group for a full string-band sound.
Ernest & Hattie Stoneman
In July and August 1927, Stoneman helped Peer conduct the Bristol sessions that led to the discovery of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. He continued to be active in recording through 1929. Between 1925 and 1929, Stoneman recorded more than 200 songs,. Falling on hard times during the Depression, the Stonemans and their nine surviving children moved to the Washington, DC, area in 1932, after losing their home and most of their possessions. There, they had four more children and struggled through dire poverty, with Stoneman taking whatever work he could find and trying to revive his musical career.
Blue Grass Champs
In 1941, Stoneman bought a lot in Carmody Hills, Maryland, where he built a shack for the family, and eventually obtained a more-or-less regular job at the Naval Gun Factory. In 1947, the Stoneman Family won a talent contest at Constitution Hall that gave them six months' exposure on local television. In 1956, Pop won $10,000 on the NBC-TV quiz show The Big Surprise and sang on the show. That same year, the Blue Grass Champs, a group composed largely of his children, were winners on the CBS-TV program Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, and Mike Seeger recorded Pop and Hattie for Folkways.
The Stonemans
Stoneman retired from labour and the Champs went full-time to become the Stonemans. They recorded albums for Starday in 1962 and 1963, and in 1964, went to Texas and California, cutting an album for World Pacific, playing at Disneyland, on some network shows and at several folk festivals. This included an appearance at the Monterey Folk Festival in 1964. Ernest appeared at the Second Annual UCLA Folk Music Festival in 1964. In 1965, the Stonemans went to Nashville, where they worked with Jack Clement, signing a contract with MGM Records and starting a syndicated TV show. They received CMA's "Vocal Group of the Year" in 1967. They appeared in the 1967 film Hell on Wheels and in The Road to Nashville (1967).
In 1967, Pop Stoneman's health began to deteriorate; he continued recording and performing through the spring of 1968, until his death in June 1968 at age 75. He is interred in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville. Following Pop Stoneman's death in 1968, Patsy Stoneman joined the band. In 1968, they had their final chart hit with "Christopher Robin," which only reached the Top 50. They underwent several major personnel changes through the '70s and began recording less frequently, gradually easing into retirement. On February 12, 2008, Pop Stoneman was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and in 2009, his wife Hattie Frost Stoneman and he were enshrined in the Gennett Records Walk of Fame.
Betty O'Hara (24 May 1925 - 18 April, 2000) was an American brass player and among jazz's best kept secrets. A gifted but obscure and under-recorded improviser/arranger who knew her way around several horns and was an expressive singer to boot. In addition to singing and composing, multi-talented jazz musician Betty O'Hara was proficient at several different instruments, including trumpet, cornet, piccolo-trumpet, flügelhorn, trombone, valve trombone, and an uncommon instrument called the double-bell euphonium.
Born in Earl Park, Indiana, O'Hara began her interest in music at the age of nine, when she took up the trumpet. She toured USO facilities as part of Freddy Shaffer’s Victory Sweethearts all-girl band in the ‘40s. After performing in such ensembles as the Hartford Connecticut Symphony, O'Hara relocated to southern California in the early '60s with her bass trombone-playing husband, Barrett O'Hara. She began working as a studio musician, before becoming a charter member of the Maiden Voyage Big Band during the late '70s, and forming the Jazzbirds with trumpeter/flügelhornist Stacy Rowles during the early '80s. It was also during the '80s that O'Hara recorded soundtracks for such hit prime-time TV programs as Hill Street Blues and Magnum P.I.
Here's Stardust from above LP
She issued two solo albums on her own. On 1985's Horns Aplenty, O'Hara is featured on trumpet, trombone, and flugelhorn as well as the euphonium. Joined by pianist Johnny Varro, bassist Morty Corb, and drummer/vibist Gene Estes, she is heard as both an instrumentalist and a singer. O'Hara's vocals on "Stardust" and "If Dreams Come True" have a Peggy Lee-ish quality and show how charming she could be, and the instrumentals demonstrate that while O'Hara was consistently swinging, she was also quite lyrical and melodic. On her 1999 album Woman's Intuition, Betty features as both a charismatic vocalist and as a stylish brass multi-instrumentalist. She plays with equal skill and finesse on trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn, bass trumpet, valve trombone, and double-belled euphonium. Thanks to tasteful multitracking, several of these are often heard at once, sometimes accompanying O'Hara's singing.
In addition to these albums, O'Hara could be heard playing multi-instruments on recordings by other artists, including John Allred's In the Beginning, Dick Cary's And His Tuesday Night Friends and Catching Up, Rick Fay's Endangered Species, and a few compilations. She was featured at the Monterey Jazz Festival and toured Japan and Brazil, and performed in the bands of Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Freeman and Tommy Newsom. She also appeared frequently as a featured soloist at U.S. festivals
O'Hara suffered two strokes in 1998, and after moving to a convalescent hospital, died at the age of 74 on April 18, 2000, in Sherman Oaks, CA, due to complications of a stroke.
Helen O'Connell (May 23, 1920 – September 9, 1993) was an American singer, actress, and hostess, described as "the quintessential big band singer of the 1940s".
Born in Lima, Ohio, O'Connell grew up in Toledo, Ohio. By the time she was 15, she and her older sister, Alice, were singing duets in clubs and hotels and on radio stations in Toledo. O'Connell sang with minor bands like Jimmy Richards and Arthur Wylie, but launched her career as a big-band singer with Larry Funk and his Band of a Thousand Melodies. She was singing with Funk's band in Greenwich Village when Jimmy Dorsey's manager discovered her. She joined the Dorsey band in 1939 and in 1940 she came top in a Metronome poll and was named Best Female Vocalist of 1940. Downbeat readers went one better and voted her Best Female Singer of 1940 and 1941.
Helen with Jimmy Dorsey & His Orchestra
Although primarily a solo singer (her 1942 recording of Brazil with the band was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2009) she is probably best remembered for the string of Latin-flavoured duets she did with the band’s boy singer Bob Eberly (older brother of Ray, who worked for Glenn Miller) – Time Was, Green Eyes, Amapola, Tangerine, Yours – all of which followed what proved a winning formula.
Helen with Bob Eberly
Eberly would croon a chorus in ballad-time then O’Connell and the band would up the tempo and swing it, the result being solid hits for all concerned. While still with the band O’Connell appeared in two prestigious Hollywood movies, Paramount’s The Fleet’s In (later remade as G I Blues with Elvis Presley) and MGM’s I Dood It. If the latter yielded the standard Star Eyes, by Gene DePaul and Don Raye, the former boasted the finer all-round score, with I Remember You, Tangerine, Not Mine, The Fleet’s In and Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing In A Hurry with lyrics by Johnny Mercer and music by Victor Schertzinger who also directed but sadly died shortly after completing the film.
Although O'Connell retired from show business upon her first marriage in 1943, she did return briefly to play herself in the 1947 biopic The Fabulous Dorseys, purportedly a true account of Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey that fit where it touched. When her marriage ended in 1951, she resumed her career, achieving some chart success and making regular appearances on radio and television. O'Connell sang duets with Bing Crosby, Johnny Mercer, and Dean Martin. In 1953, O'Connell and Bob Eberly headlined TV's Top Tunes, a summer replacement program for Perry Como's CBS television show. The program also featured Ray Anthony and his orchestra.
Stan Freberg, Helen and Bobby Troup
In March 1955 O'Connell visited Australia as a support act on the landmark tour headlined by singer Johnnie Ray, which set a new box office record for Australia that stood until the 1964 visit by The Beatles (and during which local media also reported that O'Connell was romantically linked with Ray). O'Connell also was the featured singer on The Russ Morgan Show on CBS TV in 1956. In 1957, she had her own 15-minute program, The Helen O'Connell Show, twice a week on NBC.
She was one of the first "girls" on NBC's The Today Show, commenting at the time: "I wasn't hired as a singer, I was hired as a talker, a pleasant switch." She had that role from 1956 to 1958. In 1961, she co-hosted the Desilu-NBC program Here's Hollywood, conducting interviews with celebrities, often in their own homes. It was during the 1960s she was an accomplished performer on the night-club circuit, where a stint at the Copacabana in 1964 attracted a “money” review from the New York Times. During 1964 she had a brief marriage to the actor Bob Paris, which was annulled in 1965. On August 8, that year, the Los Angeles Police Department found O'Connell unconscious in her car. United Press International reported: "Police said they found 12 capsule sleeping pills in the car." She was transported to Hollywood Receiving Hospital, where her stomach was pumped.
Helen in 1965
O'Connell co-hosted the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants with Bob Barker from 1972 to 1980 and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1976 for her coverage of the Miss Universe pageant. . She also sang the National Anthem for Super Bowl XV in 1981. O'Connell's 1942 recording of "Brazil" with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra was a 2009 addition to the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 1977, O'Connell was invited to join the "4 Girls 4" show comprising Rosemary Clooney, Margaret Whiting and Rose Marie. The format was that each member performed solo for 30 minutes and finally they all joined up together to sing as a group for about ten minutes. The act was very successful for several years and toured all over the USA. Whiting and Rose Marie left the group and were replaced by Martha Raye and Kay Starr with the show being renamed The New 4 Girls. The group finally disbanded in 1989.
In 1992, O'Connell was featured along with The Andrews Sisters and Kay Starr in the KCET special Those Fabulous 40s. Her final performance was at the Valley Forge Music Festival in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on August 14, 1993.
O'Connell was married to wealthy playboy Clifford Smith, Jr., from 1941 to 1951, and novelist Tom T. Chamales from 1957 to 1960, and had four daughters. Her third and final marriage was in 1991, to arranger-conductor-composer Frank De Vol. She died of cancer on September 9, 1993, in a San Diego hospice, California. Her funeral was held at St. Paul's Catholic Church in Westwood, California, where she was a member.
Otha Lee Moore (May 22, 1930 – August 16, 1964), better known as Tiny Topsy, was an American R&B singer. Although she is fairly well-known, there's almost nothing about her life that is substantial. She only appeared in fewer than 20 shows in a six-year period, but was never the main attraction in any of them.
"Tiny in the same spirit you'd call a bald man curly, Tiny Topsy definitely had the lungpower to match her name", writes Mark Lamarr in the liner notes for the CD "Roc-King Up A Storm" (Westside WESA 801). She was one of those big-voiced R&B women of the mid to late 50s, with a style close to that of LaVern Baker, Big Maybelle and Big Mama Thornton.
Otha Lee Moore was born in Chicago, the daughter of Annabell and Casey Moore, and was raised in nearby Robbins, Illinois, United States. According to Mike Rowes book - Chicago Breakdown she began her singing career in the mid-1940s, fronting Al Smith's eight-piece jazz and rhythm and blues band in her home town. (This was later questioned as supposedly this was something Al Smith only told Rowes)
Tiny's first recording session was held in Cincinnati on July 9, 1957 and resulted in the bouncy "Aw! Shucks Baby", (Federal Records) with a great tenor solo by Ray Felder. The label credit reads "Tiny Topsy With The Five Chances". The flip was a cover of "Miss You So", a Top 10 R&B hit for Lillian Offitt. A third track from this session, "A Woman's Intuition", remained unissued until 1988. Her next two singles - both solid rockers - "Come On, Come On, Come On" and "You Shocked Me" both saw a UK release on the Parlophone label, quite surprising, considering the rarity of US R&B releases in Blighty at that time.
Tiny Topsy's fourth Federal single is a very interesting one. Written by the aforementioned Bernice Williams, it is called "Western Rock 'n' Roll" and incorporates snippets of then-current hits Lollipop, At the Hop, Get a Job, and Short Shorts. It opens with gunshots and probably for that reason, Dave Penny (yes, the same one) calls it a "Western Movies pastiche" in his 1988 liner notes for the LP "Aw! Shucks Baby". However, the recording date of "Western Rock 'n' Roll" (March 19, 1958) predates the release date of the Olympics hit by some three months. So it looks like the sound effects on "Western Movies" were inspired by "Western Rock 'n' Roll" instead of the other way round.
In 1959, she recorded "After Marriage Blues" (also known as "How You Changed") and "Working On Me Baby" which were released on Argo Records. Her next single, which proved to be her last with Federal, was "Just a Little Bit" (1959). Rosco Gordon had a number 2 US Billboard R&B chart hit with his version in 1960. An alternate recording of "Aw! Shucks Baby" with "Everybody Needs Some Loving" on the B-side was released by King Records in 1963, months prior to her death.
Topsy with her manager Richard E. Stamz
Most sources repeat the fact that she had married Samuel Hall, a Chicago night club owner and disc jockey, and was therefore sometimes known as Otha Lee Moore Hall, but again there is no proof, only that it was stated in an article by the magazine Jet after her death. Tiny Topsy died on August 16, 1964, in Cook County Hospital in Chicago, at the age of 34 of an intracerebral haemorrhage, following an evening of performing at the C&C Lounge Club. Eight pallbearers, nearly all members of the clubs band were required to lift the body. In 2016 the Killer Blues Project placed a headstone for her at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois.
(Edited from This Is My Story and Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks)
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