Kitty Daniels, who died in Tampa, Florida on Jan. 2, 2025. Credit: itskittydaniels/Facebook

Kitty Daniels, a singer and pianist who was a fixture on the Tampa Bay music scene for nearly seven decades, died on Jan. 2. She was 90. The cause was lung cancer, said her grandson Michael Reed. She passed away at Moffitt Cancer Center with drummer Majid Shabazz—her musical and life partner of 45 years—at her side.

Her funeral was on Saturday, Jan. 18 at 1:30 p.m. inside Tampa’s Aikens Funeral Home, located at 2708 E Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

Daniels is probably best known for her residency at Donatello in Tampa, where, starting in 1999, she entertained diners and bar patrons of the Italian restaurant several nights a week. She was revered for her warm, lively stage presence and willingness to take just about any request presented to her.

“I feel like I know 90% of the songs people request,” Daniels told Creative Loafing in a 2020 interview. She sang and played piano, and was sometimes supported by Shabazz on drums. Daniels had a pliable singing voice—she drew comparisons to Billie Holiday—and was a capable improviser on piano.

Most of her repertoire came from the Great American Songbook, a vast cache of tunes written primarily in the first half of the 20th Century. Daniels mastered the canon, and could play countless numbers on command. But she could also knock out pop and rock songs by The Beatles, Billy Joel and others.

She was born Dorothy Alexander on Oct. 5, 1934, but was called Kitty from the outset. A midwife delivered her in a house on 8th Avenue in Ybor City, according to Reed, her grandson. Daniels would call Tampa’s Latin section home for nearly all of her life.

Kitty grew up in a rooming house passed down to the family from her grandmother. As a toddler with a natural musical ear, she would play a piano owned by one of the tenants. When he moved out, Kitty’s mother scraped together the money to buy the piano. Kitty started taking lessons at age six.

As a student at Middleton High School, “her music teacher would take her to society tea parties and things, and Kitty’s job was to read poetry,” Bob Seymour, the former Jazz Director for WUSF-FM and a longtime friend of Daniels, told CL. “She always credited that experience to how she would approach a lyric of all the standards she sang through the years.”

According to the documentary short film “Kitty Daniels with Majid Shabazz: Jazz Legends,” Daniels started out working as a bartender at the Cotton Club on fabled Central Avenue in Tampa, which was the epicenter of Black cultural life. In her 20s, she was the only female member of two of the most in-demand bands on the scene—Charlie Brantley’s Honeydrippers and Doc’s Skyliners. When the men hung out between sets, Daniels wanted no part of their ribald banter, so she played piano during breaks.

In the early 1960s, Daniels was frustrated that Black musicians were not permitted to join the local chapter of the American Federation of Musicians, and were therefore cut out of jobs that paid union-scale wages. She wrote a letter of complaint to James Petrillo, the national head of the union. He dispatched a representative to bring the local chapter in line, opening up union gigs for Black players and singers.

Daniels was an activist on a smaller scale as well.

“My grandmother would loan money to people in the neighborhood, help people out,” Reed told CL. “She’d make sure they had groceries, stuff like that. She was generous to a fault sometimes.”

Daniels owned a rental house next door to her home at 1202 E 15th Ave. “She provided housing for folks for almost nothing,” Reed said. Daniels took the lead in raising her grandson.

“She was the first person to hold me when I was born, and she took me in,” Reed added. “She was more like my mother than my grandmother. She let me grow and find things out on my own. She was just there to guide me and provide me a safety net. My grandmother was an artist, and she fostered art within me.”

Reed, 33, lives a few doors down from the family home and works as a labor organizer for the Service Employees International Union.

Daniels’s career as a solo artist can be credited to developing her style during band breaks—as well as her passion for dog racing. She was a regular at the Derby Lane, and never missed a race when a dog named Rinaker was chasing the mechanical rabbit. As a result, she was late to too many gigs and got fired from the Skyliners, she told CL.

Daniels went out on her own, and quickly landed a residency at the Silver Lake Golf & Country Club in northern Pinellas County, she recalled in her CL interview. Due to raising children, a husband who didn’t want her to travel and a fear of flying, Daniels’s career stayed close to home. She found her niche as a solo act, and gigged regularly.

Daniels’s local profile surged in her 80s when luminaries on the jazz scene like Seymour, Belinda Womack and members of La Lucha touted her as an artist due more attention. In 2018, Mayor Bob Buckhorn proclaimed Aug. 27 Kitty Daniels Day in Tampa. Daniels’s profile got another significant boost in 2020, when the documentary produced and directed by Louise Krikorian, played at local film festivals.

Despite late-in-life recognition, Daniels never found her way to easy street. Reed said that his grandmother was the primary breadwinner for her extended family. (Daniels had four children and helped raise two stepchildren.) The financial situation was mostly tough, sometimes dire, but Daniels never let on.

“She was taken advantage of by one of these mortgage companies with a reverse mortgage a while back,” Reed said. “And she fell behind on the payments. I wish I had known how bad it was. You shouldn’t have to wait for things to be bad for you to be present more.”

Daniels was also secretive about her illness. “I’m not actually sure how long she [had cancer] because she didn’t tell me until about a year-and-a-half ago,” Reed said. “Even then, she said she had a small nodule on her lung and it was nothing.”

Daniels continued to gig at Donatello as her condition worsened. Last fall, she collapsed at the piano, Reed said, and had to be helped up by Shabazz.

“Gino [Tiozzo, the restaurant’s owner] had to retire her because she would have tried to keep playing,” Reed added. “The great thing about the Donatello family and Gino is that he continued to pay her salary up until her death.”

But Daniels had lost a lifeline.

“We used to say in my family that the music keeps her alive,” Reed said. “I used to ask her, ‘Grandma, why are you working so much?’ And she would say, ‘I love this. It’s not work.’ So when she couldn’t play at Donatello anymore, I think deep down I knew it was getting to an end.”

The Daniels family home is under threat of foreclosure. “My grandfather [Shabazz], my mother and my sister currently live there,” Reed said. “And there’s just no money left.”

Reed, has started a GoFundMe page, Kitty Daniels: Funeral Cost and Home Preservation Fund. He wrote in the post, “Unfortunately, because of her long fight with this terrible illness, she died penniless. No money to pay for funeral arrangements or save her home in the heart of Ybor City from the bank.

“The money donated will be used to pay for funeral expenses and to save and restore the home that she built in the neighborhood that she loved and fought for. This home will be preserved for her long time romantic partner Majid Shabazz and her children and grandchildren. Ms. Kitty always wanted her family to live and build back her property in historic Ybor.”

As of Monday afternoon, Jan. 20, the fund had raised $9,120. Daniels was laid to rest on Saturday, Jan. 18 at Garden of Memories cemetery in East Tampa, three miles from her home in Ybor City.

UPDATES
01/16/24 2:05 p.m. Updated with information about Kitty Daniels’ funeral.
01/20/1:44 p.m. Updated with more details from family members.

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