Ann Dee (born 1920*- 22 March 2005) was a singer, music teacher and owner of a 1950s-era San Francisco nightclub that helped start the careers of singers Johnny Mathis and Fran Jeffries and comedian Lenny Bruce.
She was born Angela Maria De Spirito and raised in Wilkes Barre, Philadelphia, and filled her high school years with piano and singing lessons. Dee studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. When the United States entered World War II, her parents, eager to help with the war effort, moved the family to Baltimore, where her father worked as a shipyard welder and her mother was a riveter in an airplane factory. Dee worked at Bethlehem Steel and sang part time in Baltimore cabarets.
After the war, the De Spirito family moved to Los Angeles, and Ms. Dee's parents got divorced. She had already changed her name from Angela Maria De Spirito, "everybody did that in those times, all the entertainers," her brother said, and started working clubs and cabarets in the Los Angeles area. Eventually, she worked up and down the West Coast, singing as far away as Alaska, and found herself in San Francisco in the early 1950s.
With her second husband, John Barrett (who died in 1964), she opened Ann's 440 Club in North Beach, "a nightspot that ranks with the hungry i, Purple Onion, Bimbo's 365 and Fack's as a real landmark.By the mid-1950s, Ms. Dee had developed problems with her vocal cords and sang only on special occasions. Her real metier was in developing talent and working with young performers, he said. To that end, she showcased such newcomers as Jeffries and Bruce.In 1955, she hired a 19-year-old named Johnny Mathis after hearing him sing in a bar just two weeks into his professional career.Capitol Records’ George Avakian was persuaded to visit the 440 Club to hear Mathis and signed him to a recording contract.
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Here's "Free Again" from above LP
Then, in 1962, she was padlocked by the government for nonpayment of taxes, and had to sell the club.So Ms. Dee started looking for a job and eventually moved back to Los Angeles where, her voice then recovered, she returned to performing."She was a very good singer," the director of "Diamond Stud," said Greg Corarito, “and had good lungs."Her brother said, "She was short, just about at 5-foot, but what a voice. She sure could belt it out." In 1967 she recorded an album for Capitol Records titled “Free Again.”
Ann with Michael Greer 1971
Ann’s grand manner kept her employed in a number of Los Angeles clubs. She was a regular at Ye Little Club in Beverly Hills and had bit parts in a couple of movies. She played "the singer" in the 1967 George Roy Hill picture "Thoroughly Modern Millie," and appeared in a 1970 soft-core porn movie, "Diamond Stud," based on the life of railroad millionaire and bon vivant Diamond Jim Brady. She recorded her second album “With Love” in 1972.
A Times writer, reviewing her performance at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in 1973, praised her as “a sophisticated singer with a big, belting voice, fine vocal technique and great interpretive skill.” He called her delivery of “Free Again” a “masterpiece of irony” and her singing of “Send in the Clowns” an example of “pure class.”
She had spent her last years living in Palm Springs, where she ran an antiques and collectibles store during the 1980s, and then in Joshua Tree, California, where she died March 22, 2005 of lung, kidney and heart failure March 22 at the Hi-Desert Medical Center. She was 85.
(Edited from L.A. Times, SFGate & San Francisco Chronicle) (*Rate Your Records give birth year as 1921)