Georgia Dey (Pearl Collicut)

Georgia Dey (Pearl Collicut). Again a singer for which we unfortunately don’t have much information; she died in Florida in 2006. The little we do know comes from Mart Kenney’s autobiography: Mart Kenney and His Western Gentlemen published in 1981. Her real name was Pearl Collicut and in 1938, she replaced Eleanor Bartelle in Kenney’s band. The previous year, Pearl had won a singing contest at Edmonton’s Tivoli Ballroom, and Kenney was in the audience. She made her debut with the band at Vancouver’s elegant Orpheum Theatre. She was on Kenney’s first recording sessions for RCA in Montreal and stayed with the band until 1940. Her big hits with the Canadian ballroom crowds were “Heart of Mine” (recorded in 1939), “Sometime” – (the flip side of Kenney’s theme “The West, A Nest and You, Dear”), and Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs To Daddy.” Kenney also did arrangements of novelty tunes built around what he called the “kind of whimsical quality” of Georgia’s voice: the “swellelegant” (a hip word on the big band circuit in the 1930s) “Mulberry Bush”, ‘Just a Jitterbug” and the fashionable “Lambeth Walk”, the rave of London society.
-Jean-Pierre Sévigny