[Dixielandjazz] Jo Stafford (London Telegraph)

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
This sad news via the Australian Dance Bands list.
Certainly an OKOM lady over the years.
Kind regards,
Bill

> London Telegraph, July 17, 2008
>
> Jo Stafford, who died on Wednesday aged 90, not only had one of the
> most pure, wide-ranging voices in American popular song -- adored by
> wartime servicemen, who dubbed her GI Jo -- but also the ability to
> parody appalling, off-key vocalising under the guises of Darlene
> Edwards and Cinderella G Stump.
>
> She first came to notice as one of the Pied Pipers group which backed
> Frank Sinatra on his early recordings with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra
> in the late 1930s, and she made a decisive retirement in the early
> 1960s.
>
> Her wartime fame might suggest an American Vera Lynn, but admirers
> thought her possessed of greater range, wit and subtlety.
>
> It was a style neither cool nor jazz, but nor was it bland; and if
> not exactly seething, she was certainly not merely the girl-next-door
> in her approach. She could always surprise.
>
> Jo Elizabeth Stafford was born on November 12 1917 at Coalinga, a one-
> horse town between San Francisco and Los Angeles, to which her father
> Grover Cleveland Stafford had brought the family from Gainesboro,
> Tennessee, in the hope of making a fortune from oil.
>
> He managed only to find a series of mediocre jobs which were scarcely
> to see them through the Depression.
>
> Among them was one at Miss Hall's School, a private finishing-school
> for girls.
>
> Jo always remembered his being allowed to bring home the school
> phonograph on Christmas and hear a disc of the old song "Whispering
> Hope".
>
> Her mother, Anne, had been an adroit performer on the five-string
> banjo, and the folk music of Tennessee was to remain an influence on
> Jo's voice and some of her later repertoire.
>
> Meanwhile, at school, she spent five years in classical training,
> with the notion that she might become an opera singer, but she
> realised that it would require even more time than that, and there
> was a living to be earned in the meantime.
>
> She was the third of four sisters, two of them, Pauline and
> Christine, being 14 and 11 years older than her. With them, she
> formed a singing group, such sibling ensembles being typical of the
> time.
>
> The pretty Stafford Sisters were in demand. They appeared on local
> radio and, five nights a week, put in an hour on the folkie show "The
> Crockett Family of Kentucky".
>
> By contrast, they provided the voices of madrigal singers in the 1937
> Astaire-Rogers picture "A Damsel in Distress". Jo sang back-up for
> Alice Faye, and there was a distinct turning point in 1938 when
> Twentieth-Century Fox was making the film "Alexander's Ragtime Band".
> Various vocal groups were drafted in and were left to hang around
> much of the time.
>
> Among them were two groups, The Four Esquires and (also all-male) a
> trio, The Rhythm Kings. With Jo, they became the eight-piece Pied
> Pipers.
>
> As chance would also have it, two of The King Sisters, Yvonne and
> Alyce, each had a boyfriend who worked for Tommy Dorsey and were
> visiting LA.
>
> These were Paul Weston and Axel Stordahl. When the Pied Pipers
> arrived at the party given for Weston and Stordahl, they made
> straight for the refrigerator and ate all the food, even the ketchup:
> so poor were they that they had eaten little for days.
>
> Also typical of the time was that they thought nothing of piling into
> an automobile and driving across the continent to New York when it
> was clear that Dorsey would audition them for his radio show.
>
> They performed on several shows, but were then turfed out when the
> English sponsor chanced to visit and was affronted by their casual
> attitude towards lyrics, which he thought would endanger his product.
>
> The group subsisted for six months in the city, then realised that
> the game was up and headed back to the West Coast, where the men had
> to take other jobs.
>
> Just when Jo got home from collecting her first welfare cheque, there
> was a message to call Chicago and reverse the charges. It was Dorsey
> again. He could not accommodate eight singers, but wanted a quartet.
>
> The Pied Pipers left for Chicago in December 1939, just as Weston was
> leaving the orchestra to work with Dinah Shore and Sinatra was
> arriving from Harry James's band.
>
> Dorsey was a volatile character -- everybody was sacked or resigned
> at some time, usually for a few hours -- and his orchestra was
> sometimes played down by critics as a routine outfit; which was to be
> blind to its great charm and the way in which it was adapted to the
> various permutations of vocalists. The young Sinatra, for one,
> recognised this and -- whatever the bitterness of his falling out
> with a mercenary Dorsey -- would always testify as much.
>
> The first song on which the Pied Pipers appeared with him was the No
> 1 hit "I'll Never Smile Again". Perhaps the best-known of the songs
> upon which the Pied Pipers performed was "Oh Look At Me Now", which
> also featured another Dorsey vocalist, Connie Haines. (Sinatra later
> re-recorded it at a slower pace, and Jo Stafford, too, revisited it
> in the 1950s, with male background singers.)
>
> Whatever his other shortcomings, such as a volatile friendship with
> drummer Buddy Rich, Sinatra was devoted to the music. As Jo Stafford
> recalled, "most solo singers usually don't fit too well into a group,
> but Frank never stopped working at it and, of course, as you know, he
> blended beautifully with us".
>
> She herself had an eye for a song and, self-deprecatingly, asked
> Dorsey whether she might have a solo with "Little Man With A Candy
> Cigar". He not only agreed, but brought her forward on other, better
> songs such as "Embraceable You".
>
> The orchestra featured in a few forgettable movies, and by March
> 1942, Sinatra had gone solo. A few months later, the songwriter
> Johnny Mercer was able to fulfil his ambition of starting a record
> company, Capitol, on the West Coast.
>
> Mercer was keen to get Jo Stafford, and she hungered for a return to
> California. The label also featured Peggy Lee and Margaret Whiting;
> as songs came up, the company decided which singer was best suited to
> them. "It was all completely music-oriented," she recalled, "a lot of
> fun."
>
> During the decade, Jo had 38 songs in the Top Twenty, among them "The
> Trolley Song" and "My Darling, My Darling" -- and was held in
> particular esteem by servicemen for whom, like Sinatra, she made
> numerous recordings on the V-Discs distributed only within the armed
> forces.
>
> Her first No 1, in the middle of 1947, was, however, not under her
> own name. She had been walking across the Capitol studio when she
> heard the musician Country Washburn, who was working on a parody of
> Perry Como's hit "Temptation".
>
> The singer had not turned up, so, there and then, Jo Stafford
> volunteered to sing: with her voice speeded up, the result was "Tim-
> tayshun" and the alias of Cinderella G Stump, to which the label
> would not at first allow her to own up. Moreover, she had done it for
> fun; and for scale: she refused royalties, to her agent's dismay.
>
> She made various radio series, and, while doing so, realised that she
> did not care to live in New York. She returned to California, whence
> she continued to broadcast "The Chesterfield Supper Club".
>
> As well as Broadway standards, she was always keen to give time to
> America's folk heritage. She recorded albums of these songs, with
> strings, and also duets of devotional songs with Gordon MacRae, such
> as the 19th-century "Whispering Hope", which reached No 4 in 1949.
>
> She made regular appearances on the Voice of America radio station
> (and was as much a voice during the Korean war as she had been in the
> Second).
>
> When Paul Weston left for Columbia Records in the early 1950s, she
> followed him, and they were married in 1952, at which time she became
> a Catholic.
>
> She developed theme LPs, and continued to have such hits as "You
> Belong To Me" which, though recorded only to fill up time at the end
> of a session, sold two million copies. Other hits were an adaptation
> of an old blues as "Make Love To Me", Weston's "Shrimps Boats", a
> version of Hank Williams's "Jambalaya", and "All The Things You Are".
>
> Columbia's director Mitch Miller was notorious for novelty notions,
> most gruesomely pairing Frank Sinatra with a dog on "Mama Will Bark".
> Jo Stafford got off relatively lightly with eight hits with Frankie
> Laine (among them, "In the Cool, Cool of the Evening" and "Hey, Good
> Lookin'") and one with Liberace ("Indiscretion"). She had a show on
> the label's television affilliate, CBS.
>
> She had sold 25 million discs for the label, but with the advent of
> Elvis Presley in 1956, the music market changed. She now concentrated
> on albums, her range suggested by "Jo + Jazz", "Swingin' Down
> Broadway", "Ballad of the Blues", some discs of religious music, and
> a collection of Scottish tunes. At the same time, another guise
> presented itself.
>
> At a Columbia sales-convention in Florida, Weston played the piano in
> parody of a particularly atrocious supper-club performer, just as the
> session-musicians used to do if there were any time left over at the
> end of recordings.
>
> The audience, including Dean Martin's wife, Jeanne, was delighted. Jo
> Stafford was persuaded to produce several cringeworthy collections
> with her husband, just off-key enough to be plausible, under the
> names Jonathan and Darlene Edwards. They acquired a cult following.
>
> Weston then fell out with Columbia, and the pair returned to Capitol.
> The summer of 1961 was spent in England, where they made a dozen
> shows for ATV.
>
> By now they had two children and, little by little, Jo Stafford
> withdrew from the industry.
>
> She made albums on various labels, and some more devotional sides
> with Gordon MacRae, but would not make any night-club appearances.
>
> She gave much time to charities for handicapped children and singers,
> and said that she no longer sang "for the same reason that Lana
> Turner is not posing in bathing-suits any more". She resisted
> approaches by the Californian label Concord.
>
> Jo Stafford had made over 600 recordings, and she and Paul were able
> to claim the masters of those from Columbia and issue them on their
> own Corinthian label.
>
> Not that she was completely finished, record-wise: she not only
> recorded a duet of "Whispering Hope" with her daughter but returned
> to the microphone as Darlene Edwards, in 1979, for devastating takes
> on Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" and -- bizarrely -- The Bee
> Gees' "Stayin' Alive". She made one last appearance in 1982 -- on the
> same bill as Sinatra.
>
> She had always replied to servicemen who wrote to her, and was an
> authority on the war. Weston died in 1996; Jo Stafford is survived by
> her children, Tim, a guitarist and record producer, and Amy, a singer.
>
> --- End forwarded message ---