R.I.P: '40s, '50s Pop, Country Singer Kay Starr

Kay Starr

Kay Starr, who crisscrossed jazz, country, pop, blues and rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s with hits like “Wheel of Fortune” and “Rock and Roll Waltz,” died on Thursday at her home in Los Angeles.

She was 94, according to The NYTimes.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter and only immediate survivor, Katherine Yardley, said.

Ms. Starr, whose career began when she was a teenager and continued into her 80s, was a rarity: a singer who blossomed in the big-band era of the 1930s and 1940s, hit it big as a pop and country artist, and scored one of her biggest hits in the emerging rock scene of the mid-1950s.

When her style eventually faded from the pop charts, she continued to tour for decades, performing, to her surprise, to devoted crowds.

“When they brought in rock, hard rock and acid rock, I thought God was trying to tell me it was my turn to get off the stage,” she once told an interviewer. But she never did.

She was born Katherine Laverne Starks on July 21, 1922, in Dougherty, Okla., to an Irish-American mother and an Iroquois father.  Her singing career began in childhood. After she moved to Dallas with her family, she began singing to the chickens in the backyard, catching the ear of an aunt, who entered her in a local radio talent contest. Kay became a local radio sensation at age 7 and eventually had her own 15-minute show twice a week, earning $3 a performance.

She changed her last name to Starr because, she said, too many fans misheard it that way.

Kay Starr

Starr’s first records were “Baby Me” and “Love With a Capital ‘You,’” made with the Glenn Miller Orchestra when she was 16 after Miller had hired her to fill in for an ailing Marion Hutton.  After going solo in 1946, she signed with the newly formed Capitol Records the next year.

For a while she was overshadowed by two more successful female singers on Capitol, Margaret Whiting and Peggy Lee. That changed when Ms. Starr had a breakthrough hit with “You Were Only Fooling (While I Was Falling in Love)” in 1948, followed by two songs tinged with country and folk, “Oh, Babe!” and “Hoop-Dee-Doo.”

The hits continued: “Come On-a My House” (which had already been a hit for Rosemary Clooney) reached No. 8 on the pop chart in 1952, and that same year she released what is probably her best-known song, “Wheel of Fortune,” which was No. 1 for 10 weeks. The next year brought another hit, “Side by Side,” which went to No. 3.

Ms. Starr signed with RCA Victor in 1955 and recorded “Rock and Roll Waltz” (“A-one, two, and then rock, / A-one, two, and then roll ...”), which became a huge hit in the early years of rock ’n’ roll, spending six weeks at No. 1. Ms. Starr often said that she never really cared for the song but “liked it because everyone else liked it.”

Her last big hit was “My Heart Reminds Me” in 1957.