Kay Starr, hillbilly singer with crossover appeal, dies at 94

[mvcg66b3r]

Kay Starr, the self-described hillbilly singer 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.

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/a...-singer-with-crossover-appeal-dies-at-94.html

 

[Oscar Madison]

Hillbilly? Setting aside that the term is pejorative, she recorded pop (with big bands before the rock era) and jazz. She did not record country and western.

 

[davideduardo]

Hillbilly? Setting aside that the term is pejorative, she recorded pop (with big bands before the rock era) and jazz. She did not record country and western.

"Hillbilly" a pejorative?

Dwight Yoakum's "Guitars, Cadillacs" seems to contradict you.

And a snippet of that song was used in the opening medley of the 50th Anniversary CMA awards show this week and nobody in Nashville seemed offended. The word was used several times in the dialogue during the evening, and still nobody seemed to be offended.

P.S. Starr did record Western Swing, which is a part of Country music. Heree 1962 album, "Just Plain Country" is a good example of her work in the genre.

 

[TheBigA]

In all fairness to the OP, he took that term directly from the obit. And the obit says the term was "self-described." So if the term is pejorative, it came from her.

She had two charted country songs: "I'll Never Be Free" and a duet with Tennessee Ernie Ford, both in 1950.

That same year she recorded "Bonaparte's Retreat," a country song written by Pee Wee King, that charted as a Top 10 pop hit.

 

[vchimpanzee]

I like the two songs that were listed in the first post, and I think I heard them both on America's Best Music, which is pop. "Rock and Roll Waltz" has not been a part of the format for a long time, but I used to hear it a lot.