Helen Carroll

Helen Carroll, born Helen Fulk on May 23, 1914, in Bloomington, Indiana, was an American singer and Broadway performer who later became widely known as the lead voice of the vocal group Helen Carroll and the Satisfiers. She died on February 21, 2011, in Rye, New Hampshire. Carroll was married to guitarist Carl Kress (1907–1965), and the couple had a son, Rick, who became a drummer and later a professor of harmony at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.

Carroll's performing career began in her teenage years, when she sang on old-time radio in Memphis, Tennessee. She subsequently returned to Indiana and enrolled at Indiana University, which maintains campuses in Bloomington and Indianapolis, but departed in her senior year to pursue a career in broadcasting. Relocating to New York City with the goal of working in Broadway theater, she made her stage debut in 1930 in the chorus of Rogues and Vagabonds, a short-lived musical by Geoffrey O'Hara. Her subsequent Broadway appearances were intermittent across the decade. She played Daphne in Arthur Schwartz's Virginia in 1937, took the role of a Citizen of New Amsterdam in the 1938–1939 run of Knickerbocker Holiday, and appeared as a woman tourist in Key Largo in 1939. Her Broadway credits also include The Two Bouquets.

Following her Broadway work, Carroll secured steady employment by auditioning for the Merry Macs, a vocal group with which she appeared on Fred Allen's radio program and in the 1940 film Love Thy Neighbor. When the Merry Macs relocated to California, Carroll chose to remain in New York City and joined a different vocal ensemble, the Satisfiers, after the group agreed to stay based in New York. The Satisfiers consisted of Carroll and three male singers: Bob Lange, Ted Hansen, and Art Lambert. Together they became regulars on Perry Como's Chesterfield Supper Club, a radio program that ran from 1944 to 1949. The group's name was drawn from one of Chesterfield cigarettes' long-running advertising taglines, "They Satisfy." The Satisfiers also backed Como on select recordings, with or without Carroll's participation, and the group's own recordings were typically made with the orchestra of trumpeter Russ Case providing instrumental accompaniment.

Among the group's recordings, their rendition of "Old Buttermilk Sky," released on Victor 20-1952 in 1946 with the Russ Case Orchestra, reached number seven on Billboard's top-selling retail records chart for the week of November 23, 1946. The recording also appeared on Billboard's chart of songs most played on jukeboxes. Helen Carroll and the Satisfiers additionally performed the theme song for the Little Lulu theatrical animated short series, a run of 26 cartoons produced by Famous Studios for Paramount Pictures between 1943 and 1948; the theme was written by Buddy Kaye, Fred Wise, and Sidney Lippman. In 1950, Carroll backed Frank Sinatra on the single "Life Is So Peculiar," performing under the name the Swantones, an ad-hoc group assembled for that recording.

The group's discography includes numerous singles released on the Victor and RCA Victor labels throughout the mid-to-late 1940s, among them "(L'il Abner) Don't Marry That Girl!," "Who'd A Thunk It," "Shauny O'Shea," and "Big Brass Band from Brazil," all recorded with the Russ Case Orchestra. Carroll also appeared on compilation releases in later decades, including Frank Sinatra Sings Songs From the Movies (2003, Sony Music Distribution) and Adapting the Classics (2013, Sounds of Yesteryear), as well as multiple volumes drawn from Perry Como's and Jo Stafford's Supper Club broadcasts.