As she had plenty of both during her life and musical career, Anita O'Day appropriately titled her memoir, High Times, Hard Times. Born Anita Belle Colton in Chicago in 1919, she had a tough childhood: an absentee father, a physically proximate, but emotional distant mother, and the poverty endemic during the Depression years. She left school early and got her start singing for audiences via the dance marathon/walkathon circuits so popular during the Depression. At some point during this period she changed her name to O'Day (one story is that O'Day is pig latin for what she hoped to make lots of: dough). She was eventually hired on as the girl singer for the Gene Krupa big band and achieved considerable popular, if not financial success (although the song was a million seller, O'Day was payed a flat fee for her performance, and received no royalties), with "Let Me Off Uptown." The song was also a something of a cultural landmark as it paired her with African American trumpeter Roy Eldridge, a controversial move during the Jim Crow years.
Following her stint with Krupa, O'Day also sang with Woody Herman and Stan Kenton. With the later she recorded another million seller, "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine. As the big band era waned Anita went solo and had up and down levels of success through the late '40's and early '50's. In 1956, she signed with jazz impresario, Norman Granz's new Verve label. During this period O'Day achieved some of her greatest musical successes. Granz recorded her with both large and small combos. Among her notable albums on Verve for Granz were Anita Sings the Most, which paired her with the Oscar Peterson Trio along with her long-time drummer/collaborator/drug supplier, John Poole. Retitled Sings for Oscar, this album has been re-released on one disc with Pick Yourself Up, which the authors of the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings deem O'Days "iconic" album.
Anita received lots of attention in 1958 with the release of Jazz on a Summer's Day, a documentary about the previous year's Newport Jazz Festival that captured (unbeknownst to the singer) her take on Sweet Georgia Brown and Tea for Two. Although not as widely acclaimed as some of her contemporaries, this performance demonstrated O'Day's creativity, swing, and energy were on par with anyone's. Throughout her memoirs, O'Day consistently refers to herself as a song stylist rather than a singer. This performance makes obvious what she meant.
There were lots of high times of another sort, as it was during the 1950's that she developed a heroin addiction that would plague her for 14 years. O'Day recounted her ups and downs in her autobiography, High Times, Hard Times, which was first published in 1981. It is a "tell all" account, and although there are some less than kind comments about others, most of the dirt that is dug is about the author.
If you want to know more about Anita O'Day, but don't want to take the time read her autobiography, she was the subject of a biographical film, Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer released in 2009.
O'Day continued to perform and record almost to the day of her death in 2006. Her last album was released in 2007 and was fittingly titled, Indestructible.
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