She and her background vocalists were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of country and pop hits recorded in the 1950s and ’60s.
Anita Kerr, the prolific session singer and arranger who was an architect of the sumptuous Nashville Sound and later had a multifaceted career in pop music, died on Monday in Geneva. She was 94.
Her death, at a nursing home in the city’s Carouge district, was confirmed by her daughter Kelley Kerr.
Working with producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, Ms. Kerr and her quartet of background vocalists, the Anita Kerr Singers, were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of recordings made in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s. In the process, they contributed to the birth of the lush orchestral Nashville Sound, refining the rough-hewed provincial music for which the city was known into something that appealed to a wider audience.
Just as important, Ms. Kerr and her ensemble helped preserve country music’s viability in the face of the commercial threat presented by the emergence of rock ’n’ roll.
Ms. Kerr sang soprano and wrote and conducted arrangements for the group, which included the alto Dottie Dillard, the tenor Gil Wright and the bass Louis Nunley. Together they performed on hits by future members of the Country Music Hall of Fame like Red Foley, Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, as well as on major pop singles, including Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957), Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” (1960) and Burl Ives’s “A Little Bitty Tear” (1961).
Ms. Kerr and her singers also crooned the indelible “dum-dum-dum, dooby-doo-wah” on “Only the Lonely,” a No. 2 pop hit for Roy Orbison in 1960.
With the possible exception of the Jordanaires, the Southern gospel quartet featured on landmark recordings by Elvis Presley and Patsy Cline, no vocal ensemble was in greater demand for session work in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s than the Anita Kerr Singers.
“At the beginning we recorded two sessions per week,” Ms. Kerr wrote on her website, describing the postwar boom in Nashville’s music industry. “Then, by 1955, we were recording eight sessions per week, plus a five-day-a-week national program at WSM with Jim Reeves.”
“Gradually,” she went on, “we grew to 12 to 18 sessions per week, and I was writing as many arrangements for these sessions as was physically possible. Loving every minute of it, mind you. Tired at times, but happy.”
Beginning in 1956, the group began working in New York City as well, winning a contest on the popular CBS television and radio variety show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” They soon began making regular trips to appear on the program.
In 1960, another quartet led by Ms. Kerr, the short-lived Little Dippers, had a Top 10 pop hit with the dreamy ballad “Forever.”
The Anita Kerr Singers signed a contract with RCA Victor Records in 1961 and went on to release a series of albums of easy-listening music, some of them credited to the Anita Kerr Quartet. One, “We Dig Mancini,” which featured renditions of TV and movie themes written by Henry Mancini, won a Grammy Award for best performance by a vocal group in 1966, besting the Beatles’ “Help!” for the honor.
The Kerr group won the same award the next year for their cover of “A Man and a Woman,” the theme song from the 1966 French film of the same name.
During the early ’60s, the group, augmented by four additional vocalists, released several albums of contemporary pop material as part of RCA’s Living Voices series.
Ms. Kerr and her ensemble also lent their voices to a number of significant R&B hits of the day, including Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz” (1960), Esther Phillips’s “Release Me” (1962) and Bobby Bland’s “Share Your Love With Me” (1963).
In addition, Ms. Kerr wrote and recorded jingles for some of the era’s popular AM radio stations, including WMCA in New York City and WLS in Chicago.
Anita Jean Grilli was born on Oct. 13, 1927, in Memphis to William and Sofia (Polonara) Grilli, Italian immigrants who settled in Mississippi with their families as teenagers and became farm workers. Moving with his wife to Memphis, her father opened a grocery store there. Her mother, a contralto, had the opportunity to study classical music in New York but instead became a homemaker.
Anita and her two older brothers studied piano at their mother’s insistence, but only Anita, who began taking lessons at the age of 4, stayed with it. By the time she was in the fourth grade at St. Thomas Catholic School, she was playing organ for the school’s Masses.
At 15, she was hired as a staff musician for an after-school radio program in Memphis. She also played with local dance bands, for which she composed arrangements.
She married Al Kerr in 1947 and moved to Nashville after he accepted a job as a disc jockey at the local radio station WKDA. Ms. Kerr again worked with dance bands, and she also assembled a vocal quintet that was eventually hired by WSM, the station that broadcast “The Grand Ole Opry,” to perform on its show “Sunday Down South.”
A year later, Ms. Kerr and members of her group were hired as background singers for Decca Records. They changed their name, at the label’s urging, from the Sunday Down South Choir to the Anita Kerr Singers.
In 1965, after almost two decades in Nashville — and after she had divorced Mr. Kerr and married Alex Grob, a Swiss businessman who became her manager — Ms. Kerr moved to Los Angeles, where she wrote orchestral scores and worked in pop, jazz, Latin and other idioms besides country music.
She assembled a new edition of the Anita Kerr Singers and released a series of musically omnivorous records, including three mariachi albums credited to the Mexicali Singers. She made several records devoted to the catalogs of songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David and composed, arranged and conducted the music for “The Sea,” an album featuring the poetry of Rod McKuen. And she served as the choral director for the first season of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1967.
In 1970, Ms. Kerr and her husband, along with her two daughters from her first marriage, moved to Switzerland. Ms. Kerr formed yet another edition of her singing group there and continued to write, record and conduct. Two of the gospel albums she made during this period were nominated for Grammys.
In 1975, she and her husband established Mountain Studios in Montreux. They later sold it to the English rock band Queen, which eventually turned it into “Queen: The Studio Experience,” a museum and exhibition benefiting the Mercury Phoenix Trust.
Ms. Kerr remained active into the 1980s and beyond, writing scores for films including the 1972 drama “Limbo” and conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and other ensembles.
Ms. Kerr, who wasn’t always credited for her work as an arranger and group leader in Nashville — and is still is not a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame — received a special award from the music licensing organization ASCAP in 1975, recognizing her “contributions to the birth and development of the Nashville Sound.” In 1992 she was honored by the Recording Academy with a Governors Award for her “outstanding contribution to American Music.”
“Anita Kerr: America’s First Lady of Music,” a biography written by Barry Pugh with a foreword by Mr. Bacharach, was published this year.
In addition to her daughter Kelley, Ms. Kerr is survived by her husband; another daughter, Suzanne Trebert; five grandchildren; and two great-granddaughters.
From early childhood on, Ms. Kerr said, she knew she would spend her life making music.
“I did everything regarding music, I couldn’t get enough,” she wrote on her website. “I never had the problem of wondering what I was going to do when I grew up. I always knew that it would be music.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
