[Dixielandjazz] FW: Frances Langford (London Guardian)

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
Another (and good) obit of Frances Langford, via the Australian Dance Bands
list.
For those who may be wondering why some of us are a little misty-eyed
regarding Ms Langford it should be pointed out that she also recorded with
(among others) the Dorsey brothers (16 Feb 1933), the Jimmy Dorsey Orch (3
Aug 1936) and was on a 12" Decca record (17 Aug 1936) with Louis Armstrong
and Bing Crosby singing selections from the 1936 film 'Pennies From Heaven'.
Playing some of them now.
Kind regards,
Bill. 
_______________________________________________________________

Frances Langford 

Big band singer and actor who was the US forces sweetheart from the
second world war to Vietnam

by Michael Freedland
London Guardian, July 12, 2005

Frances Langford, who has died aged 91, was one of the last links
with the Glenn Miller band. She was also one of the dwindling number
of singers from the big band era -- certainly one of the last from
an age when big swing outfits would go into a loud, brassy routine
and then, as the notes subsided, a girl in a glittering dress, with
its swinging skirt, would walk to the microphone and warble a chorus
or two of Moonlight Serenade or It's Magic, while dancers smooched
as they almost listened.

But Langford was different in several ways. For one thing, she could
act, or at least could be called on to act. For another, she kept
going into her 80s -- if not singing, then talking about the people
with whom she had once sung. Not just Miller, but Dick Powell, Rudy
Vallee, the Les Brown Band and, above all, Bob Hope -- with whom she
performed to troops in the second world war, Korea and Vietnam, and,
with whom, on more than one occasion, came under enemy fire.

"The most exciting, the most rewarding, the most thrilling days of
my life," she once told me. "There is nothing, but nothing, like an
audience of fighting men. Even if you didn't always sing the music
they loved at home -- and Vietnam was in the middle of the rock era,
and I was not -- they appreciated you as coming from home."

Langford was born Frances Newbern in Lakeland, Florida, and from the
moment she first stepped in front of a band, she became known as the
Florida Thrush. She originally hoped to go into opera, but a throat
operation while she was still a teenager changed her voice.

She made her first professional appearance in 1930, at the age of
16, on a tiny local radio station at Tampa, Florida, and was heard
by Vallee, one of America's first crooners -- a cult figure, whose
principal gimmick in those pre-microphone days was to sing into a
large horn. He promptly offered the young Frances a spot on his
networked radio show.

It was the first link in a chain that led to stardom, both on and
off the dance-band platform. In the George Raft-Alice Faye film,
Every Night At Eight (1935), Langford was seen singing I'm In The
Mood For Love. Movie producers decided they were in the mood to see
and hear more of this 5ft 1in-tall girl with the rounded face. She
was not conventionally pretty -- her eyes could look a little too
far apart and her mouth too large -- but her voice was made for a
film age that specialised in her kind of velvet singing style.

Simultaneously with making films like I'll Reach For A Star and
Hollywood Hotel (both 1937), the same year Langford was starring
regularly in Dick Powell's radio show, also called Hollywood Hotel.
Altogether, she was to make 28 films, usually appearing as herself
or as someone very much like her. Among them were Romance And
Rhythm, Dreaming Out Loud and Too Many Girls (all 1940), All
American Co-Ed (1941) and Danger On The River (1942).

Her really big film break came with James Cagney's epic biography of
George M Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), in which Langford joined
Cagney in a war-bond-selling scene, singing Over There. The film was
followed by Combat America!, Never A Dull Moment and Irving Berlin's
all-soldier show, This Is The Army (all 1943). Then, between 1943
and 1946, came a virtual catalogue of the smallish musicals so
popular with wartime audiences, in Britain as well as America:
Cowboy In Manhattan, Career Girl, Girl Rush, Dixie Jamboree, Radio
Stars On Parade and People Are Funny.

Langford's last movie appearance was one of her most memorable --
singing with the filmed version of the US army air force band in the
hit 1954 biopic, The Glenn Miller Story. It seemed to give the wrong
impression that she and Miller were regular colleagues, but that did
not matter, since it also gave the perfectly accurate impression
that entertaining troops was the most important thing Langford felt
she could do. 

Her appearances with Bob Hope started in 1941, the year of Pearl
Harbor, when he first began his troop concerts, and she started
appearing regularly on his radio show. She toured the war zones in
Africa and Italy before going with Hope to the Pacific. She also
caused a storm by hitching a ride in a P38 Lightning fighter,
something strictly against military rules -- especially when the
plane went into action, strafing a beached Japanese ship.

Langford was a regular guest on the Spike Jones radio show in the
late 1940s and early 50s, and briefly co-hosted an early television
programme, The Frances Langford-Don Ameche Show (1951-52); in the
1940s, she had played the insufferable wife, Blanche, in their radio
show, The Bickersons. In 1960 came her own Frances Langford Show,
and she had an NBC radio show called Drene Time, named after a
popular American hair shampoo of the 1940s.

Langford was also a successful businesswoman. She owned the Frances
Langford Outrigger Resort, at Jensen Beach, Florida, where she gave
live performances after finishing her concert tours in the mid-
1960s. 

She was married three times: to actor Jon Hall, from 1938 to 1955;
to Ralph Evinrude, from 1955 until his death in 1986; and to Harold
Stuart, assistant secretary of the air force under President Harry
Truman, whom she married in 1994 and who survives her.
_____

Frances Langford (Newbern), singer and actor, born April 4 1914;
died July 11 2005