Lena Martell's career resists the easy obituary. She was not primarily a recording artist — she was a live performer, a cabaret act, a television host who drew 12 million viewers on a Saturday night, and occasionally a recording artist. The hit arrived almost by accident, two years after the song's first release, when "One Day at a Time" was re-promoted and found an audience that needed exactly what it offered: a country-gospel prayer for endurance sung by a Scottish contralto with the range and authority to make you believe she meant it. She was born Helena Thomson in Hamiltonhill, Glasgow, in 1940, the daughter of a trombone-playing shipyard engineer who left for Canada and a mother who held the family together with cleaning and shop work. The music came early — she was performing in a Dixie band with her saxophonist brother Allan by the age of 11, learning drums along the way. By her late teens she was singing at the Barrowland Ballroom with Billy McGregor and the Gay Birds, until the ballroom burned down in 1958 and she headed straight for London. London in the early 1960s was where the career took shape. She won a cabaret residency at the New Bagatelle in Mayfair, earned a professional name from a brandy bottle held up by an audience member, and drew notices from the Stage for her "freshness, charm and natural singing." Her impressions — Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Shirley Bassey — were apparently good enough to headline on the same bill as Sammy Davis Jr in 1963, and to earn a summer season alongside Morecambe and Wise in Blackpool. These are not minor credentials. The New York chapter is the story's hinge. In 1964 she went to Broadway to understudy Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice in the original production of "Funny Girl." When Streisand took a break, a growth on Martell's vocal cords left her unable to step in. She was grieving simultaneously: her brother Allan died in a road accident, her boyfriend Gordon Cameron died of a brain haemorrhage. Two years out of the career, and the damage might have been permanent. It wasn't. She rebuilt through cabaret — London, Scotland, Las Vegas, Sydney, Johannesburg, Hong Kong — and sold out the London Palladium in 1978, the year before the hit. "One Day at a Time," written by Marijohn Wilkin and Kris Kristofferson, held at No. 1 for three weeks in 1979, ahead of Michael Jackson and Abba. Half a dozen albums charted in the Top 40 between 1974 and 1980. The BBC television series — four of them between 1971 and 1979, the earliest drawing over 12 million viewers — positioned her as a mainstream entertainer of the first order in a way her recording discography alone would never suggest. She described her shows as "informal, light on the eye — and light on the ear as well." The phrase is more self-aware than it sounds: she knew exactly what she was making and made it well. The later years were hard. Breast cancer while caring for a mother with Alzheimer's. A triple heart bypass in 2008. Bankruptcy in 1992 after a property company failed. She performed into her 70s regardless. She outlived her partner David and moved into a care home. The obituary of someone who nearly understudied Barbra Streisand on Broadway, hosted BBC shows seen by 12 million people, played Las Vegas and Johannesburg and Hong Kong, and then died at 86 in a care home with one song most people remember — it is a particular kind of British show-business life, and it deserves to be read whole rather than reduced to a chart position.
