Jane Pickens; Popular Singer in Big Band Era

Jane Pickens, credited with being the most talented of radio’s three singing Pickens Sisters and who later toured the country in a series of operettas and musicals, has died at her home in Newport, R. I.

She was 83 and a family spokesman said she died Friday of heart failure after a long illness.

During the 1930s and ‘40s, Jane, Helen and Patti Pickens--whose Macon, Ga., parents taught them harmony when they were small children--ranked with the Andrews, Boswell and DeMarco sister acts for airwaves acclamation.

They, and the vocal groups from such bands as Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Paul Whiteman’s, could be heard on any of four radio networks during almost any hour of prime-time radio.

The Pickens Sisters originally performed at churches and small auditoriums in Georgia. But a test recording for RCA Victor brought them to the attention of radio producers who initially promoted them as “Three Little Maids From Dixie.”

But after earning more than $1 million in a five-year period, the group disbanded when two of the sisters married.

Jane Pickens continued her career as a soloist on “Ben Bernie, the Old Maestro” and “The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street” variety shows. She also had a daily radio show on NBC, which she taped in New York so she could tour the country starring in musical comedies, light operas and in nightclubs. She was a featured singer in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, played opposite Ed Wynn in “Boys and Girls Together” on Broadway, and in 1949 starred in “Regina,” a musical adaptation of “The Little Foxes.”

By then, she told The Times in 1951 when she was starring in “The Merry Widow” in Los Angeles, it had been so long since she had lived in the South that “I had to relearn my accent all over again” for her role as the vitriolic Regina.

In the 1950s, as her career wound down, Jane Pickens became a society figure, arts patron and philanthropist (two of her three husbands were well-to-do businessmen), working on behalf of the Salvation Army and for research on heart disease and cerebral palsy. A daughter from her first marriage, who survives her as does her sister Patti, suffers from cerebral palsy.

Miss Pickens even ventured into politics, running unsuccessfully as a Republican-Conservative challenger to Rep. Edward I. Koch in 1972 in the wealthy Manhattan district he represented before becoming mayor of New York City.

She also successfully painted and held one-woman shows of her landscapes and floral works, which ranged upward from $500.

“If God gave you a lot of talent, then you can do anything,” she said in 1968.