[Dixielandjazz] Louise Tobin interviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

At 91, Aubrey Native Louise Tobin Recalls Singing with Big Band Greats
by Eric Aasen
Dallas Morning News, May 24, 2010

Louise Tobin's singing career was skyrocketing.
The North Texas native had performed across the country with all sorts of bands.
She was singing with Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, whose songs became chart-toppers.
In the late 1930s and early '40s, her jazzy voice was on the radio, and her picture
was in the papers. Movie executives were reaching out to her.
But her husband, Harry James, the famous big-band musician, wanted her to stop singing.
So the songstress walked away from it all.
She got pregnant. She had one son and then another. She was focused on her husband's
blossoming career. Then, in 1943, James wanted a divorce. He left her for Betty Grable,
the actress and World War II-era pin-up. The news generated headlines across the
country.
Tobin -- born in Aubrey and raised in Denton -- doesn't let the divorce and the abrupt
interruption of her career define her. She says she is just grateful to have sung
jazz when jazz was hot.
"I feel like that was a real era of contribution to the culture of the world," said
Tobin, now 91.
"It's truly melodic. Beautiful music."
Years later, after exiting the singing spotlight, Tobin would return to her jazz
roots.
And she would fall in love again, this time with Peanuts Hucko, another famous musician.
She never lost her love of jazz and the ability to improvise, be loose with the notes
and sing harmony.
"Jazz, it's freedom," she said.
Teen talent
Tobin's brassy singing explodes from recordings, her voice full of verve and vibrato.
It's a voice that sprouted when Tobin was a kid, when she would get out of school
to sing for crowds.
In 1932, when Tobin was a young teenager, a sister read about a radio talent competition
in Dallas.
Tobin sang "Emaline." She won.
Soon, she sang across Texas.
"Listen, I was thrilled," she said. "My fulfillment was not to have to wash dishes."
Tobin landed a job singing with a band at the Sylvan, a North Texas nightclub. It
was there that Tobin met James, who played the trumpet.
"He was, without a doubt, a genius with that horn," she said.
They married in 1935.
"Oh my," Tobin said. "He had wonderful, beautiful, big blue eyes."
By 1937, James had landed a job with Goodman, while Tobin performed around New York.
In 1939, James left Goodman and started his own band.
One day, James napped while Tobin listened to the radio, preparing for a gig. She
heard the distinctive voice of a young, unknown singer. She woke her husband.
James was intrigued. He tracked down the singer and hired him.
His name: Frank Sinatra.
He would perform with James for a short time before joining bandleader Tommy Dorsey.
Years later, in 1983, Sinatra would speak at James' funeral, saying he loved him.
'Some Changes Made'
Tobin was performing at a Greenwich Village nightclub when a talent scout approached
her.
"How would you like to sing with Benny Goodman?" he said.
Goodman's songs were played on the radio and often became hits. Who would turn down
an offer like that?
When Tobin tried out, Goodman apparently didn't know of her marriage to James. But
he liked her style.
"He thought I could swing and that was his thing," she said.
A picture in 1939 in The Dallas Morning News featured Tobin and Goodman with this
caption:
"In the groove. There's a pickup to Benny Goodman's clarinet as exemplified by pert
Louise Tobin."
Performing with Goodman, she said, was dreamy.
Tobin may be best known for her rendition with Goodman of the hit song "There'll
Be Some Changes Made":
"There'll be a change in the weather, change in the sea.
Before long there'll be a change in me."
But as Tobin's career was taking off, so was her husband's.
"We were more trying to establish Harry than we were trying to establish me," she
said. "I didn't juggle it very well, as you can see."
After she quit Goodman's band in the early '40s and had her children, James asked
for a divorce and married Grable.
Did the stardom get to him?
"Who knows?" she said. "I'll never know."
Tobin eventually returned to Denton and stayed out of the spotlight.
But in 1959, she was rediscovered. She was attending a show in New Orleans featuring
Al Hirt when the trumpet player learned that she was in the audience. He pulled her
on stage. Without preparing, she belted out "Imagination."
"Imagination is funny, it makes a cloudy day sunny.
Makes a bee think of honey just as I think of you."
A recording of Tobin's singing was sent to a jazz critic and producer, who made an
offer.
"You sound great," he told her. "I want you to do the Newport Jazz Festival."
"No way," she said. She hadn't performed in years. "I'm too nervous. I can't do that."
The producer suggested she start off in smaller venues. Get your feet wet, he said.
Tobin gave in. She started singing again, this time with Peanuts Hucko and his band.
Hucko, also a prominent big-band musician, would appear on Lawrence Welk's TV show.
And, in the summer of 1962, she performed for the Newport crowds, after all.
She wowed 'em.
A critic from The New Yorker wrote her a note, saying she reminded him of a young
Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday, singing "with warmth and a total lack of calculation."
"May your new career top your first one," the note read.
Tobin said she felt reborn.
'When You're Smiling'
In 1967, Hucko and Tobin married. They spent the next few decades performing.
"Peanuts was the same caliber of musician that Harry was, except that he was on another
horn," the clarinet, Tobin said. "I went to work every night thrilled... to hear
him play."
Tobin was back with not only a new career but a new love.
Hucko's death in 2003 attracted worldwide attention.
"He was the consummate musician, a compassionate guy," she said.
A videotaped performance shows the duo ending a show in the '80s singing "When You're
Smiling."
Hucko starts off.
"When you're smiling..."
"I'm smiling," Tobin says, flashing a grin.
Then she takes over, adding her own touch.
"When you're smiling, oh, Peanuts, when you're smilin', you know the whole world
smiles with you."
Then Hucko leans in for a boisterous ending, and they sing together.
"The whole word smiles, the whole world smiles..."
They pause, letting the band pump out a few last notes.
"With you."
__________
Recent photo:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/img/v3/05-24-2010.N1A_24LouiseTobinPortrait.GQ32QQ2BG.1.jpg


--Bob Ringwald
Amateur (ham) Radio call sign K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
916/806-9551

"Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together."
--Mel Brooks