Eric on The Road

Journeys into the offbeat, off the beaten path, overlooked and forgotten - by Eric Model

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Passing: Margaret Whiting, Singer of Jazz and Pop Standards (NY Times)

From The New York Times:

By DAVID BELCHER
Published: January 11, 2011

Margaret Whiting, a songwriter’s daughter who as a bright-eyed teenage singer captivated wartime America and then went on to a long, acclaimed career recording hit songs and performing in nightclubs and on television, died on Jaunauary 10 in Englewood, N.J. She was 86.

Ms. Whiting may not have been a household name like her contemporaries Rosemary Clooney and Ella Fitzgerald, nor was she a singing movie star like Doris Day, but in her heyday she was widely popular in the worlds of big band, jazz, popular music — even country — for more than 30 years, beginning in the 1940s.

When she was 16, the comedian Phil Silvers asked her to fill in for a missing member of his act at the Grace Hayes Lodge in the San Fernando Valley. It helped start her career. At 18 she recorded the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer song “That Old Black Magic” with the bandleader Freddie Slack. The next year it was “Moonlight in Vermont” with the trumpeter Billy Butterfield and his band, followed in 1945 by “It Might as Well Be Spring,” with Paul Weston, a Rodgers & Hammerstein tune from the musical “State Fair.” That song became a signature for her.

There were more hits, among them “Come Rain or Come Shine,” a Mercer-Arlen song from the musical “St. Louis Woman.”

In 1948 alone Ms. Whiting had three major hits: “A Tree in the Meadow,” “Now Is the Hour” and “Far Away Places.” A duet with Mercer, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (by Frank Loesser), lasted 19 weeks on the Billboard chart in 1949. Her nine duets with the country star Jimmy Wakely, from 1949 to 1951, were sensations, particularly “Slippin’ Around.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/arts/music/12whiting.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home