Anita O'Day is one of the most important and influential of all jazz singers. Her career began with the big bands of Gene Krupa and Stan Kenton. But she flourished as a solo performer when the bands went out of style. Despite her popularity, especially as an exponent of the Cool style of the late 1950s and early 1960s, O'Day suffered from emotional problems, became addicted to heroin, and nearly died. Following her recovery, however, she rebuilt her career. Though her voice had coarsened slightly, her style had always depended less on the beauty of her voice than on her musicianship. O'Day's immense improvisatory skills, her precise timing, her wonderful sense of rhythm, and her great wit as a performer had not been diminished and she flourished again.
O'Day was born Anita Belle Colson on October 18, 1919 in Kansas City, Missouri. Her parents moved to Chicago soon after her birth. But James Colson abandoned his wife and daughter soon afterward, and made only sporadic reappearances in their lives. O'Day describes an unhappy childhood in her autobiography. Her mother, who had to work very hard to support them, resented her daughter and seldom showed her any affection. When she was 14, O'Day began working in "Walkathons," the Depression-era dance marathons that paid prizes to the couple who could remain on their feet the longest. The contestants became semi-professionals--working for room, board, and tips. O'Day spent two years "drifting around the Midwest as a professional Walkathon contestant under the name Anita O'Day--chosen because "in pig Latin it meant dough which was what I hoped to make" (O'Day and Eells 34). She also got her first experience singing for the audiences during the marathon intervals and decided, even after a truant officer returned her to school, that singing would be her career.
When she turned 16 O'Day began to get work as a singer in Uptown clubs. Her first exposure to jazz singers came th...