Rising Starr

At 13, she had her own radio show in Dallas. At 14, she had a band of her own called the "Rhythmaticians." At 15, she was singing with Swing Fiddler Joe Venuti's band, wandering across the U.S. on deadly one-night stands. Then Jazzman Charlie Barnet put her up against his nine brasses. "I pay for 'em," Charlie used to roar, "and I want to hear 'em." After two years of shouting, Kay Starr's voice broke down.

Last week, in "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom's big saloon on Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard, Kay, now 25, was singing with a new kind of voice. Howling down the horns had given her a husky growl on the blues--but she still had a sweet, sandpapered tone left for the ballads. And Kay, who was born on an Oklahoma Indian reservation (she is a mixture of Irish, Iroquois, Cherokee and Choctaw), was beginning to look like a girl the U.S. would soon be hearing about. Her record of I'm the Lonesomest Gal in Town has already sold more than 100,000 copies in three months. And Capitol Records, which seems to know when it has something (it also has such top girl singers as Jo Stafford, Margaret Whiting and Peggy Lee), had recorded 24 songs by Kay before the Petrillo ban.

Just how fast Kay can rise to popularity will depend a lot on James Caesar Petrillo (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). The songs of hers that Capitol stored away were largely what were handed to her. The pick of what new tunes were around had already gone to Stafford, Whiting and Lee; Kay got the scraps.

Kay is too much of a trouper to complain about that. Besides, she was free to sing old songs, which have a way of turning out to be hits these days. Kay's formula is simple: "If a tune is comfortable . . . if it feels good, I sing it."

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