Ketty Lester

Life and career

Ketty Lester was born Revoyda Frierson on August 16, 1934, in Hope, Arkansas. Her parents were farmers who would eventually have 15 children in all. As a young child, Lester first sang in her church, and later in school choirs. She won a scholarship to study music at San Francisco State College, and in the early 1950s began performing under the name "Ketty Lester" in the city's Purple Onion club. She later toured Europe as a singer with Cab Calloway's orchestra.

Ketty Lester (as Revoyda Frierson) appeared as a contestant on the December 26, 1957 episode of You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx. Lester sang "You Do Something to Me". The chosen category was "Mother Goose", a subject she admitted knowing nothing about; George Fenneman fed the correct answers to her and she and her partner won $1,000.

Returning to California, she recorded her first single, "Queen For A Day", for the Everest label. She was introduced by Dorothy Shay to record producers and songwriters Ed Cobb and Lincoln Mayorga, of The Four Preps and The Piltdown Men, who won her a contract with Era Records in Los Angeles. In 1961 they released her single, "I'm a Fool to Want You" b/w "Love Letters".

Radio listeners and disc jockeys preferred the B-side, a reworking of a 1945 hit by Dick Haymes, and Lester's recording of "Love Letters", which featured Lincoln Mayorga's sparse piano arrangement and Earl Palmer on drums, rose to # 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 early in 1962.

The record also reached # 2 on the R&B chart, and # 4 in the UK Singles Chart, selling over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc by the RIAA. In 1991, it was ranked 176th in the RIAA-compiled list of Songs of the Century.

In 1962 she toured the UK as support act on the Everly Brothers tour. The follow-up, a version of George and Ira Gershwin's "But Not for Me" from the musical Girl Crazy, reached # 41 in the US pop charts and # 45 in the UK. She released an album, Love Letters, which contained the tracks "You Can't Lie to a Liar" and a cover of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" - both of which were issued as singles which scraped into the bottom of the Hot 100 - and was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance category.

Lester continued to record for Era with little success until 1964, when she signed for RCA. She released several unsuccessful singles for that label, and two albums, The Soul of Me and Where Is Love?, in a more R&B-oriented style that has been compared to Dinah Washington and Nancy Wilson. Some of her earlier recordings also featured on one side of an album shared with previously released tracks by Betty Everett. Also in 1964, she won a Theatre World Award for her performance in the off-Broadway show Cabin in the Sky. She moved to the Tower label, issuing a single and album, When A Woman Loves A Man, an answer record to Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman". However, these releases, and later records for the Pete label including a 1968 album, Ketty Lester, met with little commercial success.

By the early 1970s, she gave up singing commercially and turned to acting. She was reportedly offered the role eventually taken by Diahann Carroll in the 1968–71 TV series Julia, and appeared in a variety of movies including Uptight (1968), Blacula (1972), Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975).

She established herself as a television actress in the 1970s and 1980s, playing the roles of Helen Grant on Days of Our Lives (1975–77) and as Hester-Sue Terhune on Little House on the Prairie (1977–83), as well as making appearances on other television shows and movies, including The Night the City Screamed (1980), opposite David Cassidy and Robert Culp. She recorded an album of Christian music entitled I Saw Him in 1984, and returned to films with roles in Street Knight (1993) and as Aunt Lucy in House Party 3 (1994).