Remembering Yma Sumac's Life and Her Visit to KC
By CHARLES FERRUZZA
Like a lot of Baby Boomers, my introduction to “pop” music was my father’s collection of record albums – and they really were albums in those days, with heavy-to-lift “collections” in book-like jackets containing two or three thick 78 RPM discs tucked into paper sleeves. Dad had very eclectic taste in music, dating back to his days as a “swinging single” in the 1950s when his seduction technique included shakers of martinis, dim lighting and the latest records by Perry Como, Dean Martin, Marilyn Maye and – strangest of all – the “Incan Princess” Yma Sumac. Even a little kid couldn’t help but be fascinated by her hard-to-pronounce songs (“Cha Cha Gitano”), her incredible four-octave range or her gloriously campy LP covers, like the one for Voice of the Xtabay or Mambo!
Sumac, whose “real life” was shrouded in mystery – was she really a singer named Amy Camus from Brooklyn who spelled her name backwards, a rumor that followed her for decades? – who died this past Saturday at age 86, had been, like many pop culture icons, “rediscovered” after a long period of neglect after her career faded in the 1960s. Until 1998, when the soundtrack to the Coen brothers movie, The Big Lebowski reintroduced the legendary “princess of the Andes” (she claimed to be descended from the Incan emperor Atahualpa) to modern audiences, Yma Sumac was best-known as a frequent answer to crossword puzzle questions.
I wondered, after Sumac’s death, if the singer had ever played Kansas City during the height of her fame in the mid-1950s. If she did perform in town, I decided, it probably would have been at the hottest nightclub venue of the Eisenhower years: Eddy’s Restaurant at 13th and Baltimore, which brought in a lot of the big musical stars of that era. So I called Jim Eddy, who now owns most of the Popeye’s Fried Chicken outlets in town, but is the son and nephew of the original Eddy brothers, who opened the stylish supper club in 1949.
“I remember Yma Sumac well,” said Eddy. “But she didn’t perform at the restaurant. She came in town in the 1950s to play at the Music Hall, but she and her entourage ate at Eddy’s after the concert. I remember that our headliner Tony DiPardo introduced her from the bandstand. She was a very big deal back then.”
Eddy’s brought in so many pop stars from the Hit Parade era that it was kind of like the VooDoo Lounge of the 1950s. The club closed in 1965 when downtown Kansas City was just beginning to hit the skids. But the building that housed the venue wasn’t torn down until four months ago.
“I stood and watched it go down,” said Eddy, “with tears in my eyes.”
That makes two things we'll miss.
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