Keely Smith
Jazz singer who performed a famous musical comedy double act in 1950s Vegas with Louis Prima
KEELY SMITH, the jazz singer, who has died aged 89, was, alongside her husband, the New Orleans-born singer and trumpeter Louis Prima, the unofficial queen of Las Vegas in the late 1950s, the pair thrilling audiences with performances at the Sahara Hotel.
Strikingly good-looking, with a pageboy bob, Keely Smith was 19 when she met the 37-year-old Prima in 1947. He was already well established as a star of the big band era. She became the female singer of his orchestra, and, in 1953, Prima’s fourth wife.
Musical styles had changed, however, and by the time they married they were struggling to find work. By November 1954, when they won a tentative two-week booking in the Casbah Lounge of the Sahara Hotel, they were almost destitute.
Reinventing their act, together with their supporting band, the Witnesses, they put together an irrepressibly energetic musical potpourri, much of it arranged by the band’s saxophonist Sam Butera, effortlessly juggling and mixing New Orleans jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and the “jump blues” of Louis Jordan – along with Italian tarantellas, recognisable jazz ballads, such as Autumn Leaves, and medleys that melted into one another, such as When You’re Smiling /The Sheik of Araby, or which abruptly changed pace (Don’t Worry About Me/i’m In the Mood for Love).
The dynamic between Keely Smith and Prima was fundamental to the act. She sang the more elegiac songs and was Prima’s comic foil. On stage, she chastised his boisterous, clowning conduct, and he, in turn, was determined to crack her deadpan facade. While her voice was lucid, Prima’s was guttural, and his raucous outbursts punctuated her poignant ballads, their performance promoting the impression that she was a demure young woman, while he was an older and more worldly man scarcely disguising his delight in having such a beautiful young wife.
They went on to became the most successful Las Vegas lounge act of the 1950s, regularly performing five shows each night. Their act was soon branded “The Wildest Show in Vegas”, and one of their first (of many) albums for Capitol Records was The Call of the Wildest. They also recorded myriad hit singles, including I’ve Got You Under My Skin and That Old Black Magic, which won a Grammy in 1959 with a performance described by one critic as “one of the greatest duets of all time”. The same year they starred in the film Hey Boy! Hey Girl! and in January 1961 they performed at President Kennedy’s inaugural ball.
But their double act came to an end later that year when Keely Smith filed for divorce, citing her husband’s reckless infidelity.
Dorothy Jacqueline Keely was born on March 9 1928, in Norfolk, Virginia, to parents of mixed Cherokee and Irish stock. They divorced when she was young, and her mother Fannie married Jesse Smith, a carpenter, whose name she took when she went professional.
She began singing aged 11 on a children’s radio show, and as a teenager sang with big bands at local military bases, before joining Louis Prima.
By the time they divorced, Keely Smith had already begun to make a name as a solo artist, recording the album I Wish You Love in 1957. After her divorce, Frank Sinatra signed her to his Reprise record label and they recorded the duet So in Love in 1963. She claimed that Sinatra had asked her to marry him, but she had turned him down. “I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke,” she explained in an interview. “I truly believe in my heart that if we had gotten married, we would have divorced.’’
During the 1960s she played to sell-out audiences across the US, and in 1965 had Top 20 hits in Britain with the album Keely Smith Sings the John Lennon and Paul Mccartney Songbook, and a single, You’re Breaking My Heart, which reached No 14 in the charts. In the 1980s she was a regular at Manhattan cabarets.
The retro lounge scene revival of the late 1990s enabled Keely Smith to embark on a new phase in her career, during which she released several new albums and returned to the live circuit, her performances winning her rave reviews for her presence, stagecraft and the enduring power of her voice. In 2001 she was nominated for a Grammy for her album Keely Sings Sinatra and in 2007 she gave her first ever live performances outside the US at Ronnie Scott’s in London.
A second marriage, to the record producer Jimmy Bowen, also ended in divorce. Later she had a long-term relationship with the singer Bobby Milano, who died in 2006. She is survived by two daughters from her marriage to Louis Prima.
Keely Smith, born March 9 1928, died December 16 2017