Lucy Ann Polk born 16 May 1927

Lucy Ann Polk (May 16, 1928 – October 10, 2011) was an American jazz singer who performed with Les Brown's orchestra in the 1950s. She also sang and recorded with Bob Crosby, Kay Kyser, Tommy Dorsey, and Dave Pell. 

Polk was born in Sandpoint, Idaho and began her music career with her sister Elvira and brothers Gordon and Charles in a quartet named the Four Polks, which was eventually changed to the Town Criers. The sibling group held forth with many of the day’s top bands (Les Brown, Kay Kyser, Lionel Hampton, et al.), with Kyser especially important as the first to feature Lucy Ann as a lead vocalist. In 1946, Polk married Dick Noel, who played trombone with Les Brown's orchestra. 

After the Town Criers broke up in 1948, Lucy Ann made a momentous career move in joining Les Brown’s orchestra the next year; so commanding a presence was she that from 1952–1954 she won the DownBeat Reader’s Poll as “Best Girl-Singer with Band,” and from 1951–1953 finished in the top 15 of Metronome Magazine’s “Best Female Singer” poll. 

Her fruitful tenure with Brown, during which she seemed destined for even greater success as a solo artist—it wasn’t a fantasy to think her smooth, smart, subtly emotional singing could translate into mainstream recording success on a par with Doris Day’s—is documented in part on Lucy Ann Polk with the Les Brown Orchestra, a 29-track CD issued by the Dutch label BV Haast. 

Lucy Ann appears on 17 of those numbers, including a breezy, upbeat “Sometimes I’m Happy” with some nice vocal shadings to emphasize the lyrics’ conflicting emotions; a wistful reading of the Carl Sigman-Bob Russell jazz standard “Crazy He Calls Me,” featuring an evocative woodwind chart adding melancholy shading to the singer’s reading (Billie Holiday trademarked this classic; ironically, in 1957 Lucy Ann would step in for an ailing Billie when the latter’s health was collapsing and forcing her to cancel shows); a cool, swinging rendition of “Them There Eyes” with a smoky but restrained sensual undercurrent energized by a frisky clarinet solo. 

                                    

In 1954 Lucy Ann embarked on her solo career with the Trend label. Her first 10-inch EP, Lucy Ann Polk with the Dave Pell Octet, was released in 1954; her second solo recording, a full album titled Lucky Lucy Ann, was released by Mode in 1957 (and reissued on the Interlude label in 1959 as Easy Livin’). 

With Pell’s octet the sound and the arrangements are expansive and a bit baroque, but never so much so as to diminish Lucy Ann’s sensitive inspection of such exquisite pop-jazz tunes as Koehler-Arlen’s “When the Sun Comes Out,” Strayhorn-Ellington’s “Just A-Sittin’ and A-Rockin’,” Cole Porter’s “Looking at You,” and four choice numbers by Sonny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, including lovely ballad performances of “But Beautiful” and “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” 

On Lucky Lucy Ann pianist-arranger Marty Paich fashioned a batch of understated arrangements and expertly deployed the instruments for a maximum atmospheric effect of late night, wee small hours reflections. The tender but sensual touch Lucy Ann could bring to ballads was in full flower by this time, and to hear what she does with Ellington’s “I’m Just a Lucky So and So”; to immerse yourself in the sultry dreaminess she invests in Styne-Cahn’s “Time After Time”; to give in to her truly sultry, low-key but smoldring reading of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Memphis in June,” is to understand what timeless artistry is all about. 

By 1960 Lucy Ann Polk had essentially ended her career and never recorded again. She still performed sporadically and appeared in the (Meet Me At) Disneyland show “Swinging at the Magic Kingdom” aired 1962 on ABC, but then moved away from the musical scene. Living in Los Angeles she married a second time, her new husband was Tommy Dorsey and Les Brown baritone saxophonist Marty Berman.

At the end of the 1990s she appeared in some re-union concerts of the Les Brown Band of Renown (e.g. October.24, 1998 at Queen Mary Hotel, Long Beach Queen Mary, Long Beach Harbour, California) and the Dave Pell Octet. In 2005 she still was at good health and did a gig in Playa Del Rey, but towards the end of her life she suffered from dementia. She died on October 10, 2011 in Glendale, California at the age of 83 years old. 

Lucy Ann was a singer´s singer and one of the most underrated singers of her time. And, as Wes Hensel(tp,arr) put it: “one of the grooviest people who ever walked this earth.” 

(Edited from The Absolute Sound & advancedpoetx.com).