Real name: Ellen Boulton

Effective period / Period of releases: 1963 - 2011

American singer and actress.

Born: March 25, 1944 in Chester, Pennsylvania
Died: August 7, 2013 in Albuquerque, New Mexico

Kelly Garrett was born Ellen Boulton in 1944 in Chester, Pa., to Jack Boulton and Sabina Griego. Her parents met when her father, a merchant marine, went for a minor operation at a hospital in Galveston, Texas, where her mother, a native of Pecos, was a nurse.
In 1946, her parents moved to New Mexico because her father loved it after visiting his in-laws. The family lived near La Cienega, then on Garcia Street in town before buying a house on Acequia Madre in 1952. Kelly attended St. Francis Cathedral School and the Loretto Academy.
“She sang when she was little. She would sing anywhere she could,” recalled her younger sister Martha “Marty” Boulton of Albuquerque. “She would sing in church. She sang in the choir in high school.”
Boulton graduated from Loretto early, at age 16, attended the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati for a year, then headed to Los Angeles, where she worked for a bank during the day so she could sing in clubs at night. She began using the stage name Kelly Garrett so she could use her real name at the bank.