Anita O'Day

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 pr

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words. For O'Day, however, singing was to be attacked in the same way an instrumentalist approached a tune; lyrics were only a minor concern and could even be dispensed with. "It was a whole new way of thinking about singing--about using the voice--that derived from jazz as an instrumentalist's art, rather than a vocalist's art of communicating words and stories" (Schuller 725). Krupa had known what he was doing, and he certainly allowed O'Day to sing in her own way. In addition to the novelty tunes she recorded better songs and, in 1942, "the first of the wordless vocal pieces, That's What You Think, singing and phrasing with the freedom of an improvising horn player (Morgenstern). O'Day never saw herself as anything but one of the musicians. She was the first band singer to wear the band uniform, with a skirt, rather than dressing in pretty gowns--at least on road trips. When she sang her stance "reflected a tough, hip insouciance" that meant business and set her apart from the rest of the big band "canaries" (Morgenstern). O'Day had "more than earned the right to be treated as a band member rather than as a visual exhibit," though she had to insist on the change herself (Priestley, "Anita O'Day"). The exhausted O'Day

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