Life Story: Norma Neely played with swing-era legends

Published 11:52 pm Saturday, August 29, 2009

A talent in the golden age of swing and big bands, Norma Neely brought her love of music to a business that thrived in downtown Everett for decades.

She owned and operated Carousel Music with her husband, Dusty Neely, a drummer who’d played with Gene Krupa, Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra and other stars.

Budding musicians took lessons at Carousel, which also sold instruments and sheet music. Opened in the mid-1950s, the store had two previous locations before it became an Everett fixture at 2510 Colby Ave.

In the mid-1960s, the couple was involved in the beginnings of the Everett Youth Symphony Orchestra. Carousel Music is listed in the youth symphony’s old accounting books as having provided instruments and music stands for the fledgling group.

By the 1980s, Carousel was a Ticketmaster outlet, drawing block-long lines of fans waiting to buy tickets for the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and other big concerts.

“Our whole life has been this music store,” Norma Neely told The Herald in 1993, when she and her husband retired and closed Carousel Music.

Norma Neely died July 6 at her home in Leavenworth. She was 87.

She is survived by her son, Dustin “Corky” Neely, and his wife, Emma Neely, of Leavenworth. She was preceded in death by her husband. Dusty Neely died in 1994.

Born Feb. 12, 1922, in Snoqualmie to Nells and Mildred Nelson, Norma moved with her family to Everett, where she learned to play the trumpet. She graduated from Everett High School in 1940. At the University of Washington, she studied music and was a drum majorette.

In 1993, Norma Neely told The Herald how she ended up in Hollywood: Chosen in a national contest as an “all-American drum majorette,” she said, she won a part in the film “College Love,” with band leader Kay Kyser.

Dusty Neely was already a player on the music scene in Hollywood, where the couple met. “He was the studio drummer for MGM at the time,” Dustin Neely said of his father. Norma and Dusty were married April 9, 1944, in San Jose, Calif.

For several years, they played music in California with legends of the era, the Dorsey Band, Sinatra, Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald and Fred Astaire. Dustin Neely, 57, said his parents moved to Snohomish County when the time came to start a family.

“Norma and Dusty helped make such a wonderful addition to Everett’s music history,” said Margaret Mayo, who graduated from Everett High with Norma. Mayo’s children played in the Everett Youth Symphony in its early days, and she remembers Norma and Dusty Neely as being among the group’s founders, along with violinist Jascha Galperin and others.

Although their music store ended up in Everett, the Neely family lived first in Lake Stevens and then in Edmonds. Dustin Neely attended Meadowdale High School.

The couple passed their musical interests on to their son.

“It was kind of a battle, an in-house war,” Neely said. “I wound up playing both trumpet and drums.”

Parenthood didn’t stop the couple from performing. As the Sophisti-Cats of Swing, they played in hotels, clubs and for private parties in the Puget Sound area.

“I have so many memories,” Dustin Neely said. “When they were still playing dance jobs, places like the officers’ club at Paine Field, they were complaining all the time about the Twist. They were from the big band era, the era of swing. They had a hard time adjusting when everybody wanted them to play something they could twist to.”

Neely said that with his parents’ Hollywood history, they weren’t like most of his friends’ parents.

“I never called them Mother or Father. I called them Norma and Dusty,” he said. “When I was growing up, it was always an adventure. Coming home, you never knew who would be there.”

Much of his childhood was spent at Carousel Music, where his mother helped run the store and taught trumpet. “They had a full repertoire of teachers — guitar, strings, saxophone, pretty much everything,” Neely said.

“That’s pretty much where I grew up,” he said.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.