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"The only thing better that singing is more singing" - Ella Fitzgerald
Long accustomed to audiences singing along with her, Vicki Knight wasn’t surprised when, while entertaining at a local nursing home, a woman in a wheel -
chair joined in as she began singing “I Belong to Glasgow.”
But then she noticed that the nurses and residents all had tears in their eyes. Later, she learned that the words of the beloved Scottish folk song were the first the woman had spoken since being there.
To Knight, singing has always been a way to connect with—and bring enjoyment to—others, something she’s been doing for as long as she can remember.
“I was the baby of seven children,” she explains, "and my big brothers loved to show off their baby sister.” In fact, she was just three years old, when her elder siblings began doling out pennies and nickels as compensation for a song. By the time she was in first grade, her voice was so impressive that she was moved to the “big kids” choir in her native Winnipeg, Canada. And she received her first paid job at age 12, with a temple choir.
"I was always a ham,” laughs Knight. “When we got our first television, I would dance and sing along in our living room.”
A Different Kind of Audience
Having spent her high school summers studying early childhood education, Knight went straight to teaching Kindergarten at the Peretz School after she graduated. She also married and had two sons, Jeff and Eric.
Still, the years of singing and choral training were not forgotten. “When I went to my first nightclub and saw the singers doing cabaret,” says Knight, “all I was thinking was… I could do that!”
Knight was encouraged by a piano player, whose daughter she had taught in Kindergarten, and it wasn’t long before she became a regular performer in
Winnipeg’s local dinner theater.
“While I loved being a teacher,” Knight says, “being a singer and teaching young children wasn’t the best combination, as I was constantly getting colds and sinus infections.”
Fate Takes a Hand
In retrospect, muses Knight, her sinus woes turned out to be a bit
of a blessing in disguise. That’s because, faced with another dreadfully cold winter in Winnipeg, she decided to visit her brothers in San Francisco.
Knight’s plane, however, was diverted to Los Angeles—and she had developed a migraine along the way. After weighing her options, she decided to take a bus to Palm Springs. “There I was, gazing out that bus window on New Year’s Day,” she says, “and seeing people sun-tanning by their pools!”
She also found that the dry desert weather suited her sinuses especially well and, from then on, she found herself torn between Palm Springs and Winnipeg. “I flitted back and forth for years,” she says, “trying to decide which
place to call home. And each time I went back to Winnipeg, it got tougher and tougher.”
Then, one evening, everything changed. “It was on my last night before returning to Winnipeg,” she relates, “and the piano player at the lounge asked if I wanted to meet another singer.”
The “other singer” was actually a mechanical engineer who had come from Denmark to manage the installation of the Palm Springs windmills. He asked Knight if she knew the English words to the song, “Red Sails in the Sunset,” which they proceeded to sing together in their respective languages. Knight eventually
married that engineer, Svend Duus, who she affectionately refers to as her “Great Dane.”
The Desert Songbird
As a permanent resident of Palm Springs, Knight made a name for herself as the “Song -bird of the Desert,” appearing in innumerable cabaret, lounge and dinner theater performances. And since the early 1980s, she has regularly entertained audiences at local nursing homes, senior centers and the Stroke Recovery Center, where she also worked as a volunteer coordinator.
Knight’s talents were also integral to the first two years of the Fabulous Palms Springs Follies. “I had seen an ad in the ‘Desert Sun’ for 50-plus women
who had showbiz experience,” she says. “I auditioned—along with several hundred other applicants—and was selected as a featured female vocalist. Yet I
couldn’t help but wonder what my mom would think if she could see me up there in my scanties!”
All told, Knight says being a Follies Girl was “quite an experience” that involved up to eight costume changes per show.
There was also an agent in Hollywood who expressed interest in Knight. “But I never had the desire to be famous,” she says. “That’s not me. I just
get such a big bang out of singing and the opportunities it offers to evoke happiness.”
Knight relates that during her years in the Winnipeg lounge scene, she had made a practice of learning songs in a variety of languages. And to this day, she
welcomes the oppor tunity to sing in Polish, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Irish, Scottish, Yiddish and Hebrew.
“People appreciate hearing a song in their native language,” she says. “I sang the ‘Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen’ to a Scottish dentist at an after-dinner show; he sent me 18 longstemmed yellow roses. Another time, I sang ‘Misty’ to a couple celebrating their anniversary and they gave me a pair of silver
earrings. But, for me, it’s all about what I can give to them. You can’t imagine the feeling of seeing an elderly couple suddenlyget up and dance in the aisle—or
the response from a stroke victim to a song that stirs something deep in their soul.”
While Palm Springs has been home for some time now, Knight still travels to Winnipeg every summer, where she makes a point of visiting senior homes and retirement centers to sing for the residents. She adds, “I am also very fortunate to still have many fans there who flock to see and hear me at the shows when
I’m performing in town.”
Knight also enjoys opportunities to visit with her sons and twin grand sons, Ethan and Jared, as well as her two “grandcats,” Tiger and Bear.
In addition, Knight says she makes time to visit the gym regularly, where she works out on the machines and spends at least a half-hour on the treadmill. She proudly notes that she weighs barely 10 pounds more than during her demanding days as a Follies Girl.
All told, the “70-ish” Knight has touched countless lives through her music and has no plans to retire. “It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to have an audience sit and listen as though they were mesmerized,” she says. “But, more importantly, I was given a gift—and have always felt obliged to share it.”
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