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Lobowolf

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Kay Starr Nov 3.

You might have to be of a certain age to recognize the name. At a holiday gathering my younger daughter mention a singing group I had never heard of that sang Wheel of Fortune. I said that Kay Starr had sung a song by that name in the early '50s. Same song, it turned out, sung by Starr in 1952. Becky, younger than I am, had never heard of it, so I brought it up on the computer. I grew up listening to popular music and she was one of my favorites.

 

 

 

We did not then have the internet and only girls read the fan magazines, but I had heard that Ms. Starr was Native American (aka Indian in 1952). Apparently so.

 

Here is a bit from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/06/kay-starr-obituary

 

 

 

Katherine Starks was born in the small town of Dougherty, Oklahoma, of Native American stock: her father, Harry, was an Iroquois and her mother, Annie, part Choctaw, Cherokee and Irish. The family moved to Dallas when Starr was three, where her father found work installing sprinklers in buildings while her mother raised chickens. An aunt noticed the nine-year-old’s pleasure in singing around the house and encouraged her to enter a talent contest at the local radio station. Starr won a prize for singing and operating a yo-yo simultaneously, and continued to win contests, so much so that the radio station WRR, Dallas, gave her a 15-minute programme of her own, paying her three dollars a show.

 

She could belt out a tune. Here are a couple, for anyone interested in the pop music culture [bE, Before Elvis] of mid century USA.

 

 

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