Soprano was one of last links to Duke Ellington

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Kay Davis Wimp | Shorefront Photographic Collection | Sun-Times

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Updated: March 18, 2012 8:10AM

The death of Kathryn “Kay” Wimp means one of the last links to jazz giant Duke Ellington is gone.

Mrs. Wimp’s classical music training at Northwestern University burnished her silvery lyric soprano, which “Sir Duke” used to ethereal effect in many recordings.

The Evanston native, who performed with Ellington from 1944 to 1950 as “Kay Davis,” was part of an unusual dream team he created of three female lead vocalists with different styles. Most swing bands used just one male and one female singer. It was a typical innovation by the man widely considered to be the greatest jazz composer-pianist-orchestra leader of all time.

Ellington’s two other key vocalists in the lineup were Joya Sherrill and Maria Ellington (no relation), who married Nat King Cole.

But Mrs. Wimp stood out. In addition to swingin’ songs, Ellington often had her perform wordless, soaring bell-like filigrees over melodies.

She “was outstanding among them for her classical training and beautiful voice. It was haunting,” said Richard Wang of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, an associate professor emeritus of music at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“She sang almost like an opera singer,” said Morris Hodara of New York City’s Duke Ellington Society. “Her specialty was really these exotic things that Ellington wrote, non-lyrical.”

Mrs. Wimp died last month at her home in Apopka, Fla., at age 92.

With her death, “There’s almost nobody left who was with the orchestra,” Hodara said, particularly from the swing era of the 1930s and 1940s.

She was born Kathryn McDonald in Evanston, the daughter of a chiropractor father and homemaker mother. Mrs. Wimp’s family was musical. Her father sang in church, and she always remembered performing.

“Marian Anderson and Dorothy Maynor were my idols,” Mrs. Wimp said in a 1980 interview for the Oral History of American Music at Yale University Library.

She graduated from Evanston Township High School and went on to Northwestern, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1942 and a master’s in music in 1943. Despite the taboos of the time, she sang a duet with a white male partner in the Waa-Mu show of 1942, according to a 2001 article in Northwestern Magazine.

But though she attended music school at Northwestern, students of color weren’t allowed to live on campus, she told the magazine: “We used to drool over Willard Hall, which was right across from the music building.”

After college, a friend heard Ellington was coming to town and suggested that she try out for him.

“And I thought: He doesn’t want a soprano,“ she said in the Yale interview.

But she went ahead and auditioned for one of his assistants, and Ellington found out about a concert she was doing on the South Side.

“He came in at the end of it,” said her son, Edward Lawson Wimp. “All the attention was drawn to the door, and there was Duke Ellington.”

He asked her to join the band. And as Ellington rehearsed Al Hibbler on “I Ain’t Got Nothin But the Blues,” he heard her magic. When she started humming along, she’d later tell the Yale historian, he urged her: “Keep that in. Do that.”

She can be heard singing on “Creole Love Call,” “On a Turquoise Cloud,” “Violet Blue,” and “Transblucency,” which Maria Muldaur re-recorded in the 1980s.

Videos of her performing — for instance, online at