REMEMBERING GITTA Part 1: Gitta Walther (birthday June, 14), the daughter of a baker, began her singing career at age 14. She was already singing with Big Bands in her native town of Annaberg, in East Germany (DDR) when she was pulled out of dance halls because she was too young to be in those places. At age 16 she was fed up that she couldnt sing as much as she wanted to so she went to West Germany, with the mandatory promise to return to the communist country, East Germany. With her obligatory family sponsor in West Germany, a cousin who owned a butcher shop just outside of Stuttgart, Gitta said she was awful at cutting and arranging luncheon meat in the store window. She left that job in a hurry, began singing and never looked back. Because Gitta failed to return to East Germany, she was officially a defector, and was not allowed to return to East Germany until the 1980s. Her mother was not permitted to visit her in West Germany until she had turned 60. In the sixties Gitta Walther was together for about 10 years with gypsy violinist Nipso Brantner. After a brief stint working in her cousins butcher shop, she took part in a singing contest for the Bayrischer Rundfunk in Munich and won first prize. Werner Müller from the Werner Müller Orchestra spotted her and soon she was singing for him, as well as for the Ambros Seelos Orchestra. In 1965, she cut her first two singles for the Philips label: the somewhat sentimental Alles Gab Ich Dir and the more upbeat Ich Will Nicht Träumen:
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 11:50:51 +0000