Bonnie Lou, Country and Rockabilly Star of the 1950s, Dies at 91

[Fansome]

Bonnie Lou, Country and Rockabilly Star of the 1950s, Dies at 91

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK DEC. 10, 2015

Bonnie Lou, a singer who achieved national stardom in the 1950s by recording hit country and rockabilly records and performing on television and radio, but whose career declined after she turned down a major-label deal, died on Tuesday in Cheviot, Ohio. She was 91.

She had been in hospice care and had dementia, said her husband, Milton Okum, who confirmed the death.

Bonnie Lou, a talented banjo and guitar player who sang and yodeled from beneath a dense blond coif, began working on country radio as a teenager. (A farmer’s daughter, she had developed her voice in the fields. “I would go out after the cows and yodel,” she told The Cincinnati Enquirer in 2007.)

She signed on to WLW-AM, a Cincinnati radio station, in the 1940s and stayed with the station after it expanded into television late in that decade. She became a regular on “Midwestern Hayride,” a country music variety program that was broadcast nationally on NBC in the 1950s. She remained on the show until it went off the air in 1972.

The television spotlight made her a recognizable face, especially in Ohio.

“We had baseball, apple pie, and Bonnie Lou,” Nicolas Martin, a fan of Bonnie Lou’s, who researched her history, told The Pantagraph of Bloomington, Ill., this year.

Her breakout hits were released by the Cincinnati-based King label in the 1950s. Her buoyant recordings of “Seven Lonely Days” and “Tennessee Wig Walk” reached the Top 10 on the Billboard country chart in 1953. Her rockabilly song “Daddy-O,” released two years later on the same label, made it to No. 14 on the Billboard pop chart.

But Bonnie Lou’s intense television schedule kept her from touring extensively, and she passed on a deal with RCA Victor Records that would have brought her to New York and, perhaps, greater national fame.

She recorded more albums and experimented with live rockabilly versions of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.” But she never had another hit.

“The sound on my records was too mixed, part country, part R&B,” she said in “We Wanna Boogie: An Illustrated History of the American Rockabilly Movement” (1989), by Randy McNutt. “It got the artists and the public confused, I believe.”

She was born Mary Joan Kath on Oct. 27, 1924, near Towanda, Ill. Her parents were farmers, and she grew up yodeling, singing and playing the violin and guitar.

She started winning local talent contests at 15 and a year later was singing on the radio in Bloomington, Ind. When she was 18 she began singing under the name Sally Carson with a group called the Rhythm Rangers on KMBC in Kansas City before moving to WLW.

The name Bonnie Lou was invented by WLW’s station manager, though the singer gave different reasons. She told some interviewers that the manager had wanted a Scottish-sounding name; she told others that since she was still under contract to KMBC, the name change ensured that she would be able to move.

Her first husband, died in a car accident in the mid-1960s.

In addition to Mr. Okum, with whom she lived in White Oak, Ohio, her survivors include a daughter from an earlier marriage, Connie Wernet; a sister, Eleanor McConkey; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Bonnie Lou was a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame in Nashville. She continued performing long after she retired from broadcasting in the mid-1970s.