Anita Kerr

Anita Jean Kerr (née Grilli; October 13, 1927 – October 10, 2022) was an American singer, arranger, composer, conductor, pianist, and music producer. She recorded and performed with her vocal harmony groups in Nashville, Los Angeles, and Europe.

Kerr was born in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1947, she married Al Kerr, and they moved to Nashville the following year so that he could take a job as a dee-jay on WKDA. The performances of a vocal quintet she organized attracted the attention of a WSM radio program director, who then hired her to lead and arrange an octet choir on the radio station's "Sunday Down South" broadcasts. Joining her were singers Carl Garvin, Jim Hall, Doug Kirkham, Mary Ellen Puckett, Evelyn Wilson, Mildred Kirkham, and Don Fotrell. The group's first recording session was with Red Foley, and their collaboration resulted in a No. 16 hit on Billboard's Pop chart in 1950: Our Lady of Fatima. The following year, producer Owen Bradley signed them to record for Decca Records. Their talents in demand, Kerr's group continued to sing backup for other country artists in Nashville, including Eddy Arnold, Burl Ives, and Ernest Tubb. The group's recording sessions—initially averaging two per week—increased to eight sessions weekly by 1955.

In 1956, Anita Kerr's singers won a contest on the Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts national television program. Now, cut to a quartet at Godfrey's suggestion, the group travelled to New York City two weeks out of every six to appear with Godfrey on his daily television and radio broadcasts. The group contributed backup vocals on Patsy Cline's first studio album. A few years later, Kerr and her singers performed five times a week with Jim Reeves on his national radio program at WSM. The quartet's roster at this time featured tenor Gil Wright (1930 – April 30, 2017),^{[citation needed]} baritone Louis Nunley (October 15, 1931 – October 26, 2012), alto Dorothy "Dottie" Dillard (August 3, 1923 – May 6, 2015), and Kerr herself as both soprano and arranger. Singers and arranger soon began contributing to between twelve and eighteen recording sessions weekly. Having previously backed Faron Young, Chet Atkins, and Webb Pierce on SESAC radio transcription sessions, the Anita Kerr Singers were invited to record their own songs for SESAC. Between 1959 and 1963, the group waxed sixty SESAC tracks. In 1960, as "The Little Dippers," the group recorded a hit single, "Forever", for Unirock Music Inc, of Little Rock, Arkansas, which was released on its University Records label. Crediting herself as "Anita & Th' So-And-So's," Kerr multi-tracked her own voice to record the song Joey Baby, in 1961.

The Anita Kerr Singers signed with RCA Victor in 1961. Their first album for the label was From Nashville...The Hit Sound. Subsequent RCA Victor LPs extended the quartet's repertoire as they explored the soul songs of Ray Charles and the compositions of Henry Mancini.

In early 1965 she described the scope of her Nashville-based background-singing work: "We have all been raised in a pop rather than a country tradition, but it doesn’t matter who we work with. We try to make pleasing, pretty sounds and stay away from anything that gets too jazzy. We’re terribly happy with our own new album, and RCA Victor which I think is the kind we’ve wanted to do and never had a change to do before. We work for all labels—with no billing—but for Victor as the Anita Kerr singers. We’ve done lots of country things and some rock and roll and we finally got Chet Atkins to let us do a real lush mood album with strings. We recorded it on the West Coast with Marty Paich. It may not sell two copies, but we love it. You’d be surprised but it’s really one of the few times we’ve had a chance to take a new approach with our recording. When we want to try something really far out, we’ll try it on a live performance during the few times we get involved in that, and then if it goes over, and we can convince our recording people to let us do it, we may use the idea on a record. Mostly we’re involved with oohs and aahs. And that’s really what most of it amounts to. Although even background styles change. Sometimes Chet…will ask us to think up something different and it’s up to us to come up with a sound. More likely, he’ll ask for a Four Seasons kind of sound. Well, that isn’t too hard because I’ve heard them. Sometimes I won’t have the faintest idea of who he means when he throws a name at us. But more often than not, they’ll play us a record of the group they want us to try to sound like and we work from there.”

The group's 1965 album We Dig Mancini won a Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Vocal Group. In addition to recording as themselves, the Singers continued to perform as backup singers in Nashville. Using Kerr's arrangements, they can be heard on songs by Hank Snow, Brenda Lee, Perry Como, Pat Boone, Rosemary Clooney, Bobby Vinton, Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson, Floyd Cramer, Al Hirt, Ann-Margret, and many other artists. Under her RCA contract, Kerr also arranged and produced a series of albums for The Living Voices on the RCA Camden budget label. These Living Voices recordings included the Anita Kerr Quartet, with the addition of four other vocalists to form an octet. In 1964, together with Chet Atkins, Bobby Bare and Jim Reeves, the Anita Kerr Singers toured Europe.

In the 1960s, Kerr composed and recorded numerous jingles for use by American radio stations, including: Gene Autry's KMPC AM-710 in Los Angeles, California; WMCA AM-570 in New York City; WLS AM-890 in Chicago and at WGH AM-1310 in Newport News, Virginia.

The Anita Kerr Singers or The Jordanaires sang background on just about every Nashville hit in the late 1950s and early 1960s. After she and Al Kerr divorced, she disbanded the Nashville version of her Anita Kerr Singers and relocated to Los Angeles in August 1965 with her second husband, Swiss businessman Alex Grob, and her daughters Suzie & Kelly. She no longer wanted to just be a background singer or arranger on country songs – she wanted to do pop music, jazz and "do more orchestral writing and music that was not just country.". She hired some lawyers to get her out of her contract with RCA's Nashville division, got a contract with Warner Bros. Records, and formed a Los Angeles version of the Anita Kerr Singers. The new group, for the next five years, would include the following personnel: alto B.J. Baker or Jackie Ward, tenor Gene Merlino or Bill Cole, baritone Bill Lee, bass Bob Tebow, and Kerr herself as soprano and arranger. The half dozen albums recorded by the Singers for Warner included a cover version of the song "All You Need Is Love" by The Beatles, and one of the LPs was exclusively devoted to the songs of composer Bert Kaempfert. Disguising the group as the Mexicali Singers, Kerr also recorded a trio of mariachi-flavored albums with musical arrangements reminiscent of the Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass sound. The Anita Kerr Singers won another Grammy Award for their recording of A Man and a Woman, released as a single on Warner Bros. Records.