Kay Starr born 21 July 1922

Kay Starr (born July 21, 1922) is an American jazz and popular singer.
 
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. After rock-and-roll swept older performers from the charts, Starr subsequently appeared in such television series as NBC's Club Oasis, mostly associated with the bandleader Spike Jones.

After departing from Capitol Records for a second time in 1966, Starr continued touring concert venues in the US and the UK. She also recorded several jazz and country albums on small independent labels, including a 1968 album with Count Basie, and Back To The Roots (1975). In the late 1980s she was featured in the revue 3 Girls with Helen O'Connell and Margaret Whiting, and in 1993 she toured the United Kingdom as part of Pat Boone’s April Love Tour. Most recently her first "live" album, Live At Freddy's, was released in 1997. Kay Starr performs Blue and Sentimental with Tony Bennett on his 2001 album Playin' with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues.

Kay resides in Bel Air, California; married six times she has a daughter and a grandchild. As of 2013, she is now 91 years old and still performing.(info from Wikipedia)

Here's a great clip of Kay Starr singing two songs on "The Colgate Comedy Hour" from 1952. "It's a Good Day" & "Wheel of Fortune"

Sue Thompson born 19 July 1925

Sue Thompson (born Eva Sue McKee July 19, 1925 in Nevada, Missouri) is an American Pop and Country music singer who was best known for her lighthearted Pop singles of the 1960s.

She was born as Eva Sue McKee in 1925 in Missouri. At the age of seven, she was already singing and playing the guitar on stage. When she and her family moved out west to San Jose, she appeared on the Hometown Hayride TV program. During World War II, she worked at a defense plant and married when she was 20, and had a daughter. Her marriage however, wasn't as successful as planned and she and her husband split up after three years. To keep supporting herself after her divorce, she returned to the nightclub scene in California. In San Jose, Thompson, entered a talent show contest and won. This caught the attention of bandleader and radio/TV host Dude Martin. Martin invited Thompson to sing with his band. This eventually led to marriage between Thompson and Martin. Thompson and Martin were both musically-inclined, they recorded some duets together, like "If You Want Some Lovin'". This was able to help her get her very own solo contract from Mercury Records in 1950.

Within only a year, Sue had divorced Dude Martin to marry Hank Penny, a comedian and singer. Penny and Thompson hosted a TV show in Los Angles together before eventually moving to Las Vegas. Thompson recorded separately and also with her husband for Decca Records. However, none of their songs ever gained any real success. 

 

 

In 1960, Thompson signed on with Hickory Records. She recorded her first singles, like "Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)". By 1961, "Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)" became a Top Five hit on the Pop charts, making Thompson a household name in music. Thompson followed the hit up successfully with the song "Norman", which was another Top Five Pop hit. Both of these hit singles were written by songwriter John D. Loudermilk. Other songs that were hits for Thompson were written by Loudermilk, like "Paper Tiger". Another song "James (Hold the Ladder Steady)", was also written by Loudermilk and brought her another hit.

In 1962, "Have a Good Time" was a Top 40 hit for Thompson. In 1963, she released "Willie Can" which was a minor hit on the Pop charts. Because of Thompson's lighthearted and breathy voice, Thompson became a favorite among the teenage crowd of the time, even though she was towards 40 years old.

In 1965, Sue had her last big pop hit with "Paper Tiger" which was a Top 30 hit on the Pop charts. After this, her singles started to show up in the lower regions of the Pop charts. Even though Thompson never had any more big successes on the pop charts, she continued to record throughout the 60s. Starting in the late 60s, she went back to country music and released a country album This Is Sue Thompson Country in 1969. 

In 1971 she worked with Country music singer Don Gibson on some albums. Some of the songs these two recorded, became respectable hits, like "I Think They Call It Love", "Good Old Fashioned Country Love" and "Oh, How Love Changes". She recorded further solo singles for the Country charts, like "Big Mable Murphy" which made the Top 50 in 1975 and "Never Naughty Rosie", her last chart single in 1976. She also performed mainly at the Las Vegas casinos and at club's in Hollywood, like the Palomino Club.

In the 1990s she settled in Las Vegas, and still continues to perform from time to time and is writing an autobiography. She plans to donate the profits to help homeless animals. (info mainly from Wikipedia)

Here's a clip of Sue singing Paper Tiger from Hollywood A Go Go

 

Lonnie Mack born 18 July 1941

Lonnie McIntosh (July 18, 1941 – April 21, 2016), known as Lonnie Mack, was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. He was an influential trailblazer of blues rock music and rock guitar soloing.

Lonnie was born in 1941 in Harrison, Indiana - some twenty miles west of Cincinnati. From family sing-alongs he developed a love of country music, while he absorbed rhythm and blues from the

late-night black radio stations and gospel from his local church. Starting off with a few chords that he learned from his mother, Lonnie gradually blended all the sounds he heard around him into his own individual style.

He began playing professionally in his early teens (he quit school after a fight with his sixth-grade teacher), working clubs and roadhouses around the tri-state border area of Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio. In 1958, he bought the guitar he still plays today - Gibson Flying V serial number 7. In addition to his live gigs, Lonnie began playing sessions for the King and Fraternity labels in Cincinnati. He recorded with blues and r&b greats like Hank Ballard, Freddie King and James Brown.
 

                              

 

In 1963, at the end of another artist's session, Lonnie cut an instrumental version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis." He didn't even know that Fraternity had issued the single until he heard it on the

radio, and within a few weeks "Memphis" had hit the national Top 5! Lonnie Mack went from being a talented regional roadhouse player to a national star virtually overnight.

Suddenly, he was booked for hundreds of gigs a year, crisscrossing the country in his Cadillac and rushing back to Cincinnati or Nashville to cut new singles. "Wham!," "Where There's A Will There's A Way," "Chicken Pickin'" and a dozen other records followed "Memphis." None sold as well as his first hit, but there was enough reaction to keep him on the road for another five years of grueling one-nighters.

Fraternity Records died, but Lonnie kept on gigging, and in 1968 a Rolling Stone article stimulated new interest in his music. He signed with Elektra Records and cut three albums. Elektra also reissued his original Fraternity LP, The Wham Of That Memphis

Man (now available on Alligator Records). He began playing all the major rock venues, from Fillmore East to Fillmore West/ Lonnie also made a guest appearance on the Doors' Morrison Hotel album. You can hear Lonnie's guitar solo on "Roadhouse Blues," preceded by Jim Morrison's urgent "Do it, Lonnie! Do it!" He even worked in Elektra's A&R department. When the label merged with giant Warner Brothers, however, Lonnie grew disgusted with the new bureaucracy and walked out of his prestigious job. The seventies would turn out to be Mack’s lost decade. Save for two country releases in 1977, nothing was added to his discography between the years of 1972 and 1984.

Lonnie began his re-emergence on the national scene in November of 1983.At Stevie Ray Vaughan's urging; he relocated from southern Indiana to Austin, Texas. He began jamming with Stevie Ray in local clubs and flying to New York for gigs at the Lone Star and the Ritz. Strike Likr Lightning (AL 4739), for Alligator records was released co-produced by Lonnie and Stevie Ray and featuring Stevie's guitar on several tracks. The joint effort was one of 1985's best selling independent records and topped many critics' "Best Of" list for that year. Lonnie Mack's career traces the history of rock and roll.

Drawing from influences as diverse as rhythm and blues, country, gospel and rockabilly, Lonnie has won the hearts of fans worldwide. He is revered by a new generation of rock performers. He has played     everywhere from tiny roadhouse clubs to huge rock showcases and national television. He has recorded for major labels and indies alike.

In 1986, Mack joined Buchanan and Dickey Betts for "The Great American Guitar Assault Tour". He released three more albums over the next four years, including his last, in 1990, a blues-rock LP entitled Lonnie Mack Live! – Attack of the Killer V!. Then, worn from the constant touring required to sell records, he ended his recording career. However, he continued to play the roadhouse and festival circuits at his own pace through 2004. 

His last commercial performances were in 2004. He remained retired except for a handful of isolated special appearances over the next few years: Mack died from "natural causes" on April 21, 2016 (age 74) at a hospital near his log-cabin home in rural Tennessee. In the media, his death was overshadowed by that of rock superstar Prince, who died on the same day. Mack was buried in Aurora, Indiana.

(Edited from Wikipedia & rockabilly.com)

Carla Boni born 17 July 1925

Carla Boni (17 July 1925 in Ferrara, Italy – 17 October 2009 in Rome, Italy), was an Italian singer.

Born as Carla Gaiano in Ferrara, Boni had worked on RAI, the Italian State Radio and television network, as a singer since 1951. She sang the Italian version of song Johnny Guitar. In 1953 she won the Festival della canzone italiana with Flo Sandon, singing "Viale d'Autunno". In 1955 Boni won the "Festival di Napoli" with the song "'E stelle 'e Napule", which she sang with her husband, Gino Latilla. In 1956 she released a new version of the standard Mambo Italiano, which went on to become her greatest hit. In 1957 she released the song "La Casetta in Canada".

                     Here's "Malaguena" from 1953

 

During her career she formed a band with her husband, Nilla Pizzi and Giorgio Consolini. She competed at Sanremo five times between 1953 and 1961 and carried on performing on Italy's equivalent of the oldies circuit for much of her life.

In the 1990′s she revisted “Mambo Italiano” as a featured guest with the Flabby band.

In 2007 she pulled out of the making of an album which was to be titled "Aeroplani e Angeli" with songs written by Alessandro Orlando Graziani.  On 5 October 2008 Carla Boni participated in the event Omaggio a Pino Rucher, una vita per la chitarra / Homage to Pino Rucher, a life for the guitar. The event in honor of Pino Rucher (RAI guitarist), twelve years after his death, was sponsored by the Municipal Authorities of Manfredonia and by the Authorities of the Province of Foggia. Although seriously ill in 2009 she shot a music video for the song "Portami in India" as a goodbye to her fans.

She died at her home in Via delle Belle Arti, Rome after a long illness. Her funeral was held at the Santa Maria in Montesanto church, known as the "Church of artists." (Info scarce, mainly Wikipedia) 

Tommy Bruce born 16 July 1937

Thomas 'Tommy' Charles Bruce, singer, (July 16 1937 - July 10 2006) had one of the most individual of British vocal styles to emerge during the early 1960s. 

Bruce's upbringing was near-Dickensian in its hardship. He was born Thomas Charles Bruce in Stepney, East London; by the time he started at secondary school, both his parents had died. On leaving a Middlesex orphanage in 1952, he endured an unhappy engineering apprenticeship before becoming a van driver. Then an uncle found him a job at Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market, to which he returned after national service as a storeman in the Royal Ordnance Corps.

By 1959, he was living in Notting Hill, west London, where a fellow tenant, songwriter Barry Mason, decided that Bruce at least looked like a pop star, and asked him to make a demonstration tape of Ain't Misbehavin, in a style reminiscent of the Big Bopper's recent million-seller, Chantilly Lace. He was backed by four Birmingham musicians, known as the Bruisers, and his EMI producer was Norrie Paramor. With its slurred diction and gravelly ranting, Bruce's rendition reached No 3 in the charts.

 

 

     Here's the B side to Ain't Misbehavin'

 Bruce was next plunged into an exhausting schedule of variety seasons, one-nighters with the Bruisers, and such presentations as 1960's Rock'N'Trad package tour - swiftly renamed Idols on Parade - with 15 other vocalists, headed by Billy Fury. High-pitched fan adulation, however, gave a false impression of his standing as a chart contender. A second single, Broken Doll, struggled to No 36, and a hat-trick of flops prefaced 1962's Babette, which barely made the Top 50. Further releases included London Boys, a B-side that was adopted as a signature tune, and, in 1963, a rocked-up version of the Lavender Blue nursery rhyme, with Bruce conveying the impression that he, too, was aware of its ridiculousness. Some people maybe surprised to know that he appeared in films, the most notable of these being "The Man With The Yellow Hat" in which he took the lead role supported by

Eleanor Somerfield and John Slater.

By then he was a regular on ITV's Stars and Garters, a variety series broadcast on Saturday evenings to counterpoise the BBC's Billy Cotton Band Show. His cockney urbanity suited the beery atmosphere, and, tellingly, he was involved in comedy routines as well as singing spots. He was thus set up for a lucrative living in cabaret, much of it before British holidaymakers in Spainand Malta. After settling in Watford, he also cut an avuncular figure on the 1960s nostalgia circuit, and was received with affection when sharing the bill at Heroes and Villains, a huge charity fundraiser at London's Dominion Theatre in 1985.

Onlookers could not help but visualise each performer, albeit ravaged by age, in some fixed attitude, doing what they did during some optimum moment in the swinging 60s - and, sure enough, there was Bruce, shirt open, tie loosened, microphone gripped just above his paunch, giving them Ain't Misbehavin.

In 2002 Tommy made what was to be his last performance at The London Palladium. He received two standing ovations during his five-song set. This proved once again what the big promoters constantly overlooked, the public loved Tommy Bruce and more to the point he loved them.

In March 2006 he won a lifetime achievement award from the Heritage Foundation, an arts and entertainment trust, and his biography, Have Gravel Will Travel, written by manager Dave Lodge, appeared in June 2006. Sadly, Tommy died as a result of prostate cancer on July 10 2006. (info from various sources)

Nina Van Pallandt born 15 July 1932

Baroness Nina Van Pallandt (born Copenhagen, July 15, 1932) is a Danish singer and actress.

Born Nine Magdelena Möller, she married Frederik, Baron Van Pallandt, the son of the Dutch ambassador to Denmark in September 1960. She was also married briefly to Robert Kirby, a South African satirist in the 1970s. She now lives in Barcelona, Spain.

 

 

They formed a singing duo, Nina & Frederik who were Danish easy listening icons of the 1960s who moved effortlessly from folk to calypso to pop to protest songs ("Listen to the Ocean," "Sucu, Sucu," "Little Donkey"). Whether on record, television or stage, their distinctive sweet harmonies and melodic songs won many fans; they also had an extraordinary knack of making Christmas records all-year round listening. They played the London Palladium in 1966.

They had three children: Floris Nicolas Ali, Baron van Pallandt (1961) Kirsa Eleonore Clara, Comtesse van Pallandt (1963)
Ana Maria Else, Comtesse van Pallandt (1965)

The couple split up in 1969 and Nina went on to a solo career as a singer and Hollywood actress. They divorced in 1975.
Nina's first marriage was on 11 August 1955 to Thorvald Théodore William Wessel. She was also married briefly to Robert Kirby, a South African satirist in the 1970s.

When writer Clifford Irving made headlines in 1972 for allegedly gaining access to the elusive Howard Hughes, it became public knowledge that Nina Van Pallandt had been having an affair with Irving. Shortly after publishing a series of Hughes "interviews," Irving was exposed as a literary fraud, having completely fabricated the interview sessions. While Irving protested the authenticity of his writings, Van Pallandt drove the nail in his credibility coffin by insisting that Irving had been vacationing in Mexico with her at the time he was supposedly picking Hughes' brains.

Even as Clifford Irving was being escorted to prison, Van Pallandt's singing career soared. Nina Van Pallandt was able to finesse her 15 minutes of fame into a 15-year film career; merely ornamental in

many of her films, Nina Van Pallandt actually delivered a semblance of a performance in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973).

In the 2007 film The Hoax, about Irving's fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, Nina van Pallandt is portrayed by Julie Delpy. Ironically, the film starred Richard Gere, who appeared with the real van Pallandt in one of his earliest films, American Gigolo.

Frederik undertook a nearly reclusive existence in the Balearic Island of Ibiza, but the couple remained good friends and Nina too made a base on the same island.

 

During the late 1980s, the baron began to spend increasing amounts of time on his yacht in the Philipines where he is alleged to have become involved in some doubtful business dealings. It was there, during May 1994, that he was shot dead by an unknown assassin- a tragic end to an amazing life. (Info various mainly Wikipedai)

Del Reeves born 14 July 1937

Franklin Delano Reeves (July 14, 1932 – January 1, 2007), better known as Del Reeves, was an American country music singer, best known for his "girl-watching" novelty songs of the 1960s including "Girl on the Billboard" and "The Belles of the Southern Bell". He is also known for his 1968 trucker's anthem, "Looking At The World Through A Windshield", which demonstrated he was capable more than just novelty songs. He became one of the most successful male country singers of the 1960s.

Reeves was born in Sparta, North Carolina on July 14, 1932. He was named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been nominated by the Democratic Party to be their presidential nominee just a few days before he was born. The youngest of 11 children, he learned guitar by borrowing his brothers' instruments while they were serving in World War II. He was a local radio star by age 12 and later attended Appalachian State College and served in the Air Force, which led to a relocation to Sacramento. He recorded for Capitol Records 1957 - 1958 and became a regular on The Chester Smith Show from 1958-1961, after which he moved to Nashville and began recording for Decca. He also recorded for Reprise Records and Columbia Records.

Everything began to change when Reeves signed with United Artists Records. The work he did for United Artists is probably his best-known work. He finally scored big in 1961 with the hit song "Be Quiet Mind". Later in 1965, he had his first No. 1 hit with "The Girl On The Billboard" which sold a million copies and earned him

the nickname of the Doodle-Oo-Doo-Doo Kid for the nonsense syllables that he sang with the song's guitar intro. His other hits included "The Belles of Southern Bell," "Women Do Funny Things to Me," "Looking at the World Through a Windshield," "Good Time Charlie's," "Be Glad" and "The Philadelphia Fillies." 

During this time, he and his wife became a songwriting team and wrote songs for the likes of Rose Maddox, Carl Smith and Roy Drusky, to name a few.  In the late 1960s, he recorded an album paying tribute to Jim Reeves (no relation) and also appeared in several Hollywood films, including a starring role in "Cottonpickin' Chickenpickers", and a supporting role in Burt Reynolds' first big movie Sam Whiskey.

Reeves became a regular performer on the Opry in 1966, and performed for up to 1 million people a year on the long-running country show. During his 40 years at the Grand Old Opry, he was hailed as one of its best entertainers because of his comic timing. Along with his music, he did impressions of stars such as Jimmy Stewart, Johnny Cash and Walter Brennan.

In the 1970s, he released a series of duets with Bobby Goldsboro and Penny DeHaven. He also returned to television, hosting the syndicated TV program, Del Reeves' Country Carnival.

His last big hit was "The Philadelphia Fillies". His career declined in the mid-1970s and then started to slowly move away from country music, although he recorded some duets with Billie Jo Spears in 1976.

In 1979, Reeves pursued a career as a music executive although he continued to record in the 1980s, just not as much and for smaller labels. In the early 1990s, he promoted the emerging career of singer Billy Ray Cyrus. The arrangement ended up in court with Reeves suing for damages. The matter was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

He continued to perform at the Opry until his final years.  He died from emphysema on New Year's Day, 2007.(Info various sources mainly Wikipedia & Legacy.com)