Jo Stafford: Multi-million-selling hit singer who with 'You Belong to Me' was the first woman to top the UK charts | The Independent Jo Stafford: Multi-million-selling hit singer who with 'You Belong to Me' was the first woman to top the UK charts Friday 18 July 2008 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online In 1950, Stafford joined Columbia and hit record followed hit record AP In 1955, Columbia Records presented Jo Stafford with a diamond-studded disc to mark her selling 25 million records for the label. Ironically, this marked the peak of her career, as she had only moderate success subsequently. The award coincided with the advent of rock'n'roll and it became increasingly difficult for middle-of-the-road singers like Stafford, no matter how good, to retain their commercial success. Jo Elizabeth Stafford was born in Coalinga, California in 1917. Her father had come to Coalinga in search of oil, but within a few years, the family moved to Long Beach and he took a succession of menial jobs.

Stafford studied singing with a view to performing opera, but then formed a vocal group, the Stafford Sisters, with her elder sisters, Christine and Pauline. They appeared regularly on a Los Angeles radio station and sang a madrigal in Fred Astaire's film A Damsel In Distress (1937). When the sisters married, Stafford joined her husband, John Huddleston, and six others in the Pied Pipers vocal group. One of Tommy Dorsey's arrangers, Paul Weston, heard and recommended them to the mercurial Dorsey. He took them to New York for a national broadcast, but the sponsor disliked their singing and dismissed them. They remained in New York and recorded, without success, for RCA. When the group disbanded and returned to LA, Dorsey asked Stafford to be part of a quartet, still called the Pied Pipers, and join his orchestra. The band was hugely popular and although the Pied Pipers contributed to Dorsey's success, the main selling factor was Dorsey's new male vocalist, Frank Sinatra. The Pied Pipers supported him on such hits as "I'll Never Smile Again" and "Stardust".

Like everybody in the orchestra, Stafford had a difficult time with Dorsey, who would sack musicians on a whim and reinstate them the next day, but he allowed her solo performances including "Little Man With a Candy Cigar" and "Embraceable You". Dorsey's arranger, Sy Oliver, gave Stafford a new song he had written, "Yes Indeed", which became a standard. In 1943, the Pied Pipers left Dorsey and joined a new record label, Capitol, which was formed by the songwriter Johnny Mercer. The label's musical director was Stafford's friend Weston and, by now divorced from her first husband, she married him in 1952. He took an immense interest in her career, finding her good songs and writing sympathetic arrangements. Stafford undertook concert tours for the troops and she became known as "GI Jo", although she jokingly called herself "Miss Outgoing Freight". She had hit records with "The Trolley Song" and "My Darling, My Darling", and Nat King Cole played piano on her 1946 recording of "I'll Be With You In Apple Blossom Time".

After Perry Como revived the oldie "Temptation" in 1945 with immense success, Stafford recorded a million-selling parody, "Tim-tay-shun", in 1947 under the name Cinderella G. Stump with Red Ingle and the Natural Seven. In 1948, with Gordon MacRae, she had another million-selling single with "Say Something Sweet to Your Sweetheart" and the following year, they combined their talents again with equal success on "Whispering Hope". Over the years, Stafford recorded many inspirational albums, some with MacRae. In 1950, Stafford joined Columbia and hit record followed hit record. She sang several, big selling duets with Frankie Laine including "Hey Good Lookin'" and "In The Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening". They were an odd couple – Laine would bellow his lines, while Stafford sang brightly and smoothly and without any vibrato. She also recorded with Nelson Eddy ("With These Hands"), Gene Autry ("My Heart Cries For You") and Liberace ("Indiscretion").

Her recording of "Ragtime Cowboy Joe" credited a pianist, Pat Gillham, but this was a private joke: Gillham owned a ranch where the Westons stayed with their children and the pianist was really the bandleader Lou Busch. Anyone who has attended a pub quiz will know that the first ever UK No 1 was "Here In My Heart" by Al Martino in November 1952. Relatively few know that the No 2 record was Jo Stafford's "You Belong to Me" and that it sold so well that it became the UK's second No 1 some 10 weeks later, thus making Stafford the first female to top the UK charts. By the time Stafford finally made the top, her follow-up, a pop version of Hank Williams's country song "Jambalaya" had come and gone. The lyric of "You Belong To Me", her biggest success, makes little sense today – why is this man globetrotting and leaving his girlfriend at home, and where does his money come from?

The answer is that he was one of the millions doing national service, and several songs of the time reflected the separation of servicemen from their loved ones – "Auf Wiederseh'*Sweetheart" (Vera Lynn, 1952), "Arrivederci Darling" (Anne Shelton, 1955) and "I'll Be Home" (Pat Boone, 1956). Stafford had several other hits, including Weston's arrangement of the folk song "Shrimp Boats" with the Norman Luboff Choir (1951), "Teach Me Tonight" (1954), "Make Love to Me", a classic example of songwriting by committee, as it had eight composers (1954), "Suddenly There's a Valley" (1955) and "On London Bridge" (1956). She recorded several albums of standards, including Swingin' Down Broadway (1958) and I'll Be Seeing You (1959). Weston and Stafford would entertain party guests by pretending to be Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, a bad cabaret act from New Jersey.

Stafford would sing off-key in a high-pitched voice while Weston, playing the piano, would lapse into appalling rhythms. Rather like a precursor to Phoenix Nights, they made humorous records as America's worst club act and even won a Grammy in 1961 for the Best Comedy Album of the year. They continued to make these comic records (although it was a repetitive joke) long after they had stopped making serious records and in 1978 even parodied the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive". In 1961, the Westons spent the summer in London with their children and Stafford recorded several ITV specials including one in which the actor Edd "Kookie" Byrnes unwisely sang and danced alongside Stafford, Rosemary Clooney, Mel Tormé and Lionel Blair. Stafford also had a very popular series on Radio Luxembourg. During the 1960s, Stafford recorded for Frank Sinatra's label, Reprise, and she sang on his new recordings of the scores of Kiss Me Kate and Guys and Dolls. In 1964 she made the album Getting Sentimental Over Tommy Dorsey.

Stafford effectively retired from performing in 1975, but she did return for a tribute show to Sinatra in 1990. She said that she did not want to sing "for the same reason that Lana Turner is not posing in bathing suits anymore". Instead, she did much organisational work for charity, particularly for mentally handicapped children. Paul Weston died in 1996 and, in 2006, Jo Stafford donated her archives to the University of Arizona. Spencer Leigh Jo Elizabeth Stafford, singer: born Coalinga, California 12 November 1917; married 1941 John Huddleston (marriage dissolved 1943), 1952 Paul Weston (died 1996; one son, one daughter); died Century City, California 16 July 2008.

More about: Wistful Singer, Jo Stafford, Is Dead at 90 - The New York Times The New York Times Music |Wistful Singer, Jo Stafford, Is Dead at 90 Search Jo Stafford, the wistful singing voice of the American home front during World War II and the Korean War, died on Wednesday at her home in Century City, Calif. She was 90. The cause of death was congestive heart failure, her son, Tim Weston, said Friday. A favorite of American servicemen, Ms. Stafford earned the nickname G.I. Jo for her recordings in which her pure, nearly vibrato-less voice, with perfect intonation, conveyed steadfast devotion and reassurance with delicate understatement. She was the vocal embodiment of every serviceman’s dream girl faithfully tending the home fires while he was overseas. First as a member of the Pied Pipers, who sang with Tommy Dorsey and accompanied the young Frank Sinatra, and later as a soloist, Ms. Stafford enjoyed a stream of hits from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s. Her biggest hit, “You Belong to Me,” in 1952, sold two million copies.

Ms. Stafford sang everything from folk songs to novelties to hymns. Her gift for hilarious musical parody was first revealed in the 1947 novelty sensation “Temptation” (“Tim-Tayshun”), a hillbilly spoof recorded under the name of Cinderella G. Stump with Red Ingle and the Natural Seven. It reached No. 1 on the music charts. Continue reading the main story A decade later, a party act with which she and her husband, the arranger and conductor Paul Weston, had amused their friends became a secondary comedy career, in which they impersonated Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, an excruciatingly bad New Jersey lounge act “presented by Jo Stafford and Paul Weston.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story While Mr. Weston played the wrong chords and fudged the rhythm, Ms. Stafford sang a half-tone sharp. Mr. Stafford won her only Grammy, for best comedy album (“Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in Paris”), in 1961.

The Edwardses records, the last of which was a hilariously inept 1977 single of “Stayin’ Alive,” with their version of “I Am Woman” on the flip side, rank as classic pop spoofs alongside those of Spike Jones and Weird Al Yankovic. But it was as a balladeer interpreting standards like “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Haunted Heart,” “All the Things You Are” and “The Nearness of You” that Ms. Stafford distilled as pure a vocal essence of romantic nostalgia as any pop singer of the 1940s and ’50s. Jo Elizabeth Stafford was born on Nov. 12, 1917, in Coalinga, Calif., near Fresno and brought up in Long Beach. As a child she studied voice and hoped to become an opera singer, but because of hard times decided to join her older sisters Christine and Pauline in a country-and-western singing group, the Stafford Sisters, who performed on the radio in Los Angeles. After the Stafford Sisters broke up, Ms. Stafford, with seven male singers from two other groups, formed the Pied Pipers, an octet that caught the attention of Mr.

Weston and Axel Stordahl, arrangers for the Dorsey band. Reduced to a quartet, the group joined Dorsey and quickly gained fame as the backup singers for Sinatra. Photo Jo Stafford, a singer who was a favorite of American servicemen during World War II. Credit Associated Press In 1940, the No. 1 hit “I’ll Never Smile Again” established the creamy Dorsey-Sinatra-Pied Pipers sound. Ms. Stafford recorded her first solo record with Dorsey, “Little Man With a Candy Cigar,” in 1942. Her first husband, John Huddleston, whom she later divorced, was a singer in the group. Two years later, she left the band to sign with Capitol Records, the new label established by Johnny Mercer. Along with Margaret Whiting and Peggy Lee, Ms. Stafford became one of Capitol’s three female pop mainstays. Mr. Weston became Capitol’s musical director and Ms. Stafford’s arranger and conductor. They married in 1952. Weston died in 1996. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter.

You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy Besides their son, Tim, of Topanga, Calif., Ms. Stafford is survived by their daughter, Amy Wells of Calabasas, Calif.; a younger sister, Betty Jane; and four grandchildren. During the early Capitol years, Ms. Stafford’s U.S.O. tours and V-Discs (recordings specially made for servicemen) earned her the nickname G.I. Jo. In 1945, “Candy,” in which she and Pied Pipers accompanied Mr. Mercer, went to No. 1. Advertisement Continue reading the main story From the mid- ’40s on, Ms. Stafford was a major radio star, who sometimes used her show, “The Chesterfield Supper Club,” to acquaint the public with Southern Appalachian folk music. She recorded a groundbreaking album, “Jo Stafford Sings American Folk Songs” and followed it with “Songs of Scotland.” The folk-pop singer Judy Collins has credited Ms. Stafford’s version of “Barbara Allen” as an important inspiration for her early folk career. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, Ms.

Stafford and Gordon McRae teamed for a series of hit duets, including “My Darling, My Darling,” from the Broadway musical “Where’s Charley?” and the devotional song “Whispering Hope.” When Mr. Weston left Capitol Records for Columbia, Ms. Stafford followed him. Her Columbia albums, like “Swingin’ Down Broadway,” “Ski Trails,” “Ballad of the Blues” and “Jo + Jazz” (with the arranger Johnny Mandel) foreshadowed the modern concept album. Her biggest hits for the label included “Make Love to Me,” a pop version of Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya,” and “Shrimp Boats.” On several hits she was teamed with Frankie Laine, the most popular of which was their duet of another Williams song, “Hey, Good Lookin’.” After a falling out with Columbia in the late 1950s, Ms. Stafford returned to Capitol, then joined Sinatra’s label Reprise. In 1966, Ms. Stafford went into semiretirement, and after “Stayin’ Alive,” she retired completely.

She re-appeared once, in 1990, at an event honoring Sinatra. Many of her hits have been reissued on Corinthian Records, a record company Mr. Weston founded as a religious label. Many years after her retirement, Ms. Stafford looked back happily on her musical life with Weston. “Our talents — his and mine — fit the music of the time,” she said. “And the music fit us. We were very fortunate, because if both of us were starting out today, we’d starve to death!” 50sPopMusic.com 50sPopMusic.com 1950s EASY-POP Songs and Singers...on the verge of Rock 'n Roll Jo Stafford (born November 12, 1917) Famous EASY-POP hit single during the 50s: You Belong To Me 1952 Jo Stafford also had hits with No Other Love in 1950, Shrimp Boats in 1951, Jambalaya in 1952, and Make Love to Me in 1954.

Recording career with hits on the charts: 1944-1957 Record Label: Columbia Classically trained and technically gifted, Jo Stafford was born in Coalinga, California. She was a member of Tommy Dorsey�s vocal group, the Pied Pipers whose recordings included Candy, Yes Indeed, and Manhattan Serenade in the early forties. At Capitol records she recorded Say Something Sweet to Your Sweetheart in 1948 and Whispering Hope in 1949, both with Gordon MacRae, then a string of solo hits in the fifties. Admired for the range, warmth, and purity of her voice, Jo Stafford is considered one of the most versatile singers of the era. At Columbia Records she was the first artist to sell twenty-five million records. She was accompanied on her recordings by her husband and top-flight arranger Paul Weston and his Orchestra. As a lark, the couple released a bad-lounge-act comedy album�he was the inept Jonathan Edwards playing on an untuned piano and she was Darlene Edwards, an off-key singer. The 1961 cult favorite won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album. Jo Stafford died in 2008.

Jo Stafford's Best Jo Stafford, 90, Singer of Swing, Standards, and Lampoons - The New York Sun Jo Stafford, 90, Singer of Swing, Standards, and Lampoons Staff Reporter of the Sun | July 18, 2008 Jo Stafford, who died Wednesday at 90, was a recording artist and big band vocalist who was among the most adored female singers of her generation, whether crooning a classic or cutting up with hillbilly high jinks. Click Image to Enlarge Metronome circa 1955: EXCLUSIVE Profile view of American pop and jazz singer Jo Stafford singing at a microphone in a recording studio. There is a hinged acoustic wall around her. She wears a light-colored sweater and a pearl necklace. (Photo by Metronome Between the end of the swing era and the early years of the rock 'n' roll era, Stafford was a constant presence on the pop records charts, landing nearly a hundred hits and selling a reputed 25 million records for Columbia Records alone.

In an era of homey, emotional singers, Stafford was known for the cool, sultry sound of her voice, her sublimely understated approach, and her unique capacity for bringing any song an air of mystery. A flagship interpreter of the Great American Songbook, she was also a champion of such adjoining styles as country and folk. She carved out a parallel career in comedy. Her friend and admirer Rosemary Clooney once said, "The voice says it all: beautiful, pure, straightforward, no artifice, matchless intonation, instantly recognizable. Those things describe the woman too." Raised in a musical household in Long Beach, Calif., Stafford performed from a young age. "When I was still a kid in high school, my sisters Christine and Pauline, who were 11 and 14 years older than I, were in radio as the Stafford Sisters ï¿½ a very original name." The Stafford Sisters recorded commercially for the first time with trumpeter Louis Prima and his orchestra in 1936. Jo Stafford later joined forces with seven male singers to form an octet called The Pied Pipers.

Bandleader Tommy Dorsey hired a downsized version of the group as a quartet with Stafford as lead voice and female soloist. The Pied Pipers' tenure with the Dorsey band (1940-1942) coincided with the trombonist's "discovery" of a remarkable boy singer, Frank Sinatra. The combination of Dorsey, Sinatra, and the Pied Pipers led to a series of hits, including "I'll Never Smile Again," that marked the beginning of a long stay on the pop charts for both Stafford and Sinatra. When the Pied Pipers left Tommy Dorsey at the end of 1942, Johnny Mercer signed them to his new Capitol label. Stafford soon went solo and became a top seller on Capitol.

Her biggest for the label was "Some Enchanted Evening." In 1950, Stafford and her second husband, arranger-conductor Paul Weston, switched allegiances to Columbia Records in 1950, where she had a crossover country-inspired hit with "Tennessee Waltz." Folk forms inspired some of her best work, including "American Folk Songs" and "Songs of Scotland." She also had hits with Weston's folk-styled "Shrimp Boats" and several numbers by Hank Williams, including "If You've Got The Money, I've Got The Time," "Hey Good Lookin'," and "Jumbalaya." Her single biggest chart hit was the 1954 "You Belong To Me." In 1947, she recorded as "Cinderella G. Stump," singing a countrified parody of the old torch tango "Temptation" as (sung "Tim-Tay-Shun") ï¿½ a hit and a favorite record of the real-life country diva June Carter. Later, she and Weston invented the duo of Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, whose gift for butchering the standard rules of music led to some of the funniest recordings ever made.

Stafford would sing a quarter tone sharp, Weston would play all the wrong notes, and they would perform earnestly sincere renditions of some of the stupidest songs ever written, from "Tip Toe Through The Tulips" to "Stayin' Alive." Her sole Grammy was for "Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in Paris" in 1961. Yet Stafford's most important contribution was interpreting the great Broadway-oriented writers. Her 1947 recording of "Haunted Heart" is effective because it's so subtle, because Stafford holds something back and doesn't shove her emotion in the listener's face. In the early years of the LP, Stafford recorded a string of classic albums for Columbia, including two collections of show music "Broadway's Best" (1953) and "Swinging Down Broadway" (1958), a set of World War II songs entitled "G.I. Jo" (1960). Rather than do a conventional Christmas album she made a set of winter songs called "Ski Trails" (1956). She made a brilliant jazz album with the swinging accordionist Art Van Damme ("Once Over Lightly," 1957).

She reached a pinnacle with "Jo + Jazz" (1960) in which arranger Johnny Mandel masterminded brilliant settings for Stafford and a contingent of stalwart players, mostly from the Duke Ellington band. Even into the 1960s, when her type of high-quality, traditional pop music was being phased out, she continued to find new ideas to explore, like "The Ballad of The Blues" and "Do I Hear A Waltz." With nothing left to prove, Stafford had largely retired by the end of the 1960s; she concentrated on her two children, Amy and Tim Weston, and both she and her husband (who died in 1996) were both founding members and longtime officers of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Her last known public performance was at a 1990 salute to her old friend Frank Sinatra.

receive the latest by email: subscribe to the new york sun's free mailing list Jo Stafford - Telegraph Obituaries Jo Stafford 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. 8:34PM BST 17 Jul 2008 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 though 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 accomodate 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 McRae, 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 McRae, 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'sI 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.

The Paul Weston and Jo Stafford Collection - Jo's page: Biography Jo Stafford, “America’s Most Versatile Singer,” is one of America's most successful and celebrated vocalists. In the 1940’s and 1950’s she amassed 31 top-ten hits, was regarded as the favorite singer of the Armed Forces and was the first female artist to sell 25 million records. Jo Elizabeth Stafford was born on November 12, 1917, in Coalinga, California. She was born to Grover Cleveland and Anna York Stafford. Her mother was a distant cousin of the Word War I Medal of Honor recipient, Alvin York. Jo Stafford began her professional career singing with her sisters, Christine and Pauline, in a group known as The Stafford Sisters. They performed on radio shows such as David Brockman’s California Melodies and the Crockett Family of Kentucky Show. They were also featured as off-screen voices with the major motion picture studios. After her sisters married, the group disbanded, and members of the Three Rhythm Kings and The Four Esquires joined Jo to form the Pied Pipers vocal group.

Including Jo, this group consisted of (8): John Huddleston (Stafford's husband at the time), Hal Hopper, Chuck Lowry, Bud Hervey, George Tait, Woody Newbury, and Dick Whittinghill. Like the Stafford Sisters, the Pied Pipers also worked on radio and motion pictures. In 1938, Tommy Dorsey’s arrangers, Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston, heard the Pied Pipers and convinced Tommy Dorsey to sign them for his radio show. They appeared briefly on Tommy Dorsey’s radio show in New York until the show’s sponsor fired them after hearing their rendition of “Hold Tight.” In late-1939, Tommy Dorsey rehired them, this time as a quartet, and they stayed with him until 1942. The group featured Chuck Lowry, John Huddleston and Clark Yocum (who replaced Billy Wilson). After leaving the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the group traveled to California. In 1943, Capitol Records signed them to a recording contract. Their first appearance, which predated their first recording session, was on the radio show Johnny Mercer’s Music Shop.

In October - the month the recording ban was lifted for Capitol - they recorded their first sides with Johnny Mercer and Paul Weston. Some of the songs they recorded were released on Capitol’s first album, Songs By Johnny Mercer. In 1944 Jo left the Pied Pipers and embarked on her solo career. She appeared with the USO during this time and established the nickname “G.I. Jo.” Jo became a top radio personality during the 1940’s starring on the Chesterfield Supper Club, The Revere Show, and The Carnation Show. She became Capitol Records’ top selling artist during the 1940’s with 21 top ten records. When Paul Weston left Capitol Records for Columbia Records in 1950, she followed suit. Shortly afterward she recorded some of her most successful albums, “Shrimp Boats,” “You Belong To Me,” and “Make Love To Me.” In 1952, she received the distinction of being the first female artist to sell 25,000,000 records. In February 1952 she married Paul Weston.

They celebrated their honeymoon in Europe by capping it off with her most celebrated concert appearance of her career at the London Palladium. In 1952 they had a son, Tim; a daughter, Amy, was born in 1956. Her radio career continued in the 1950’s with her appearance on two international radio shows, the Voice of America and the Jo Stafford Show on Radio Luxembourg. Her popularity in the United States and abroad gained her recognition as a cultural ambassador for democracy and as “America’s Most Versatile Singing Star.” She also starred in her first television show in 1954, The Jo Stafford Show. Jo’s versatility is well shown in the diversity of records that she made in a range of styles from the blues, pop, jazz, country, comedy, folk and spiritual. She also recorded popular duets with Frankie Laine and Gordon MacRae. Her 1960 record as Darlene Edwards resulted in a Grammy Award. In the mid-1960’s, she retired from the record business and focused on her family and charity work with her husband. She is a past president of SHARE, one of Hollywood’s most charitable organizations, dedicated to helping mentally handicapped children.

Jo passed away on July 16, 2008 leaving two children and four grandchildren. Stafford family Valentine's Day card. Caption reads "Roses are red, violets are blue. Sugar is sweet, and believe it or not, This is Jo Stafford wishing you A Happy Valentine's!" Acrobat Music > Today`s Anniversary > Jo Stafford, American singing star of the '40s & '50s, was born on 12th November 1917 Register with us Useful links Jo Stafford, American singing star of the '40s & '50s, was born on 12th November 1917 Jo Stafford (her real name) was born in California on November 12th 1917, and studied to become an opera singer. With the privations of the Depression, however, she formed a vocal group with her sisters and got work on radio in Los Angeles, and in 1937, with her sisters she worked with Fred Astaire on the vocal arrangement for "Nice work if you can get it".

The group broke up when her sisters got married, and she joined a new group, the Pied Pipers, who were spotted by Tommy Dorsey's arrangers, and joined Dorsey's orchestra in 1939. She became a featured soloist, as well as backing Frank Sinatra's early recordings. She left in 1943 and signed to Johnny Mercer's new Capitol label, where one of the Dorsey arrangers who had signed her, Paul Weston, was musical director. They were later to marry. She became hugely popular for her Forces' broadcasts in WWII and hosted the popular radio series the Chesterfield Supper Club. Through the '40s she had a string of successful records, including two million-selling duets with Gordon McRae, followed by moer duet success with Frankie Laine in the early '50s. her sols hits of the early '50s included "Jambalaya", "Shrimp Boats" and in 1952 "You belong to me", her biggest hit of all, a No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, and the first UK No. 1 by a female artist.

Her pop career waned with the impact of rock 'n' roll, although she remained a popular TV performer. She also had a second career as a comedy performer with her husband Paul Weston, producing brilliant and hilarious parody albums under the name of Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, a lounge act featuring off-key vocals and sub-standard piano playing. She largely retired from the business in the late '60s, retiring completely in 1979, apart from making a cod version of "Stayin' alive" under the Edwards' identity in 1979. She and Weston won control of her catalogue in the early '90s and released it on their own Corinthian label. She died from heart failure in 2008 in Los Angeles. Acrobat has on catalogue a collection of some of her recordings - for details click here.

Jo Stafford - Biography - IMDb Jo Stafford Biography Showing all 27 items Jump to: Overview (4) | Mini Bio (2) | Spouse (2) | Trivia (16) | Personal Quotes (2) | Salary (1) Overview (4) The Voice of America Mini Bio (2) Jo Stafford's early fame came as a vocalist with the big band of Tommy Dorsey , for which she sang both on her own and with her group, The Pied Pipers . After leaving Dorsey in 1944, Stafford went solo, eventually racking up no less than 93 hits over the next 13 years. Among them: chart-toppers like "Candy" (1945), "My Darling, My Darling" (1948), "You Belong To Me" (1952) and "Make Love To Me" (1955). According to Joel Whitburn's Record Research, Jo Stafford and Dinah Shore were the two top female hit-makers of the pre-rock era. Jo also ranked #6 among all hit makers of the early '50s (1950-4).

As her music career dominated her time, Stafford's movie appearances were limited to a handful in '40s films featuring Dorsey and his band. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Theroux - garytheroux@earthlink.net Born in Coalinga, in California's San Joaquin Valley, Jo Stafford got her start in music when her family moved to the Los Angeles area and her older sisters got jobs at a local radio station. Although Jo had, as a teenager, trained to be a classical opera singer, the Depression quickly dried up what little demand there was for opera singers, and she joined her sisters at the radio station in a singing act called The Stafford Sisters. The girls became quite popular and soon had their own radio show. After her sisters' marriages resulted in the act breaking up, Jo joined up with a recently formed eight-man group called The Pied Pipers , in which she sang lead. Their sophisticated sound and smooth harmonies gained a large following in the area, and they soon found themselves hired to work on movie soundtracks. This brought them to the attention of the arrangers for Tommy Dorsey 's orchestra.

One of them, Paul Weston (who later married Jo) talked Dorsey into getting the group a spot on a popular radio show called "The Raleigh-Kool Show" out of New York. The group drove cross-country to New York, the spot went well and they were hired to appear on the show for ten weeks. Unfortunately the businessman who was sponsoring the show, who hadn't heard them on the first show, finally did--and hated them. They were promptly fired, and found themselves stranded in New York City with no job and little money. They did manage to find enough work to pay their way back to California, where four of the group's members dropped out. Eventually the remaining members were rehired by Dorsey and joined his orchestra (one of their tasks was to back up a new singer who had just joined the band, named Frank Sinatra ). They were a big success and stayed with the band until 1942, when Dorsey--who was known for his bad temper--got into a raging argument with one of the group's members, and the entire group quit. It didn't hurt their career, however, as they quickly found work with local radio stations and were soon signed by Johnny Mercer for his newly formed label, Capitol Records.

In 1944 Jo (who had had married Weston by this time) left the group to go solo, and became one of the most popular singers of the era, especially with servicemen, who nicknamed her "G.I. Jo". She left Capitol for Columbia Records in 1950, which eventually got her her own TV show, The Jo Stafford Show (1954), on CBS (the label's parent company). Her career continued unabated, with a string of hit records such as "Shrimp Boats", "Jambalaya" and "Make Love to Me", and in 1961 Capitol Records hired her back with a six-album deal and another TV show (she also had a television show in Great Britain, where she was wildly popular). Her career wasn't all serious, though. One day during a recording session with some time left over, she and her husband, as a gag, recorded some songs as a truly awful third-rate lounge act called Jonathan and Darlene Edwards--"Jonathan" played piano, badly, and "Darlene" sang terrible songs off-key, and neither character had a clue as to how supremely untalented they were.

The songs gained a following--with no one knowing that Jonathan and Darlene were actually Jo and her husband--and in 1960 they released a Jonathan and Darlene album called "Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in Paris", which promptly won a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album--ironically, the only Grammy Jo would earn in her long and successful career. Jo went into semi-retirement in 1966, only making occasional television appearances and a few recordings, and left the business entirely in 1975. Her husband died in 1996, and she lived in California, where she helped her son Tim run the family business. Corinthian Records repackages and releases many of Jo's old songs (she won the masters back from Columbia Records in a breach-of-contract lawsuit she filed against the label). - IMDb Mini Biography By: frankfob2@yahoo.com Spouse (2) Member of The Pied Pipers from 1938-1944. 1960 Grammy Award winner (as Darlene Edwards) in Best Comedy Performance-Musical category for "Jonathan and Darlene Edwards In Paris" with husband Paul Weston (as Jonathan Edwards).

From 1944 through 1957, she had 83 records on Billboard's pop music charts as a solo artist. Had two children with second husband Paul Weston . Tim became a musician and record producer and Amy a singer. Her first husband was The Pied Pipers singer John Huddleston . Despite her brief time as a solo artist (she ended her career in the 1960s), she sold more than 25 million records. Began her solo career after leaving the Dorsey Orchestra in 1942 with the new Capitol Records label. She later moved to Colubmia Records in 1950 and then back to Capitol in 1961. Her parents were Grover Cleveland Stafford and Anna (York) Stafford. The family moved to Long Beach, California when she was young and where she had five years of classical voice training. The only Grammy Jo won was as her off-key singing alter-ego Darlene Edwards when she won "Best Comedy Album" in 1960. She was a favorite singer of GI's during WWII. Servicemen affectionately called her GI Jo.

The Pied Pipers went from an octet to a quartet once they began working with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in 1939. Sang in The Stafford Sisters , a vocal sister trio with her two older siblings, Pauline Stafford and Christine Stafford . She was awarded 3 Stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording at 1625 Vine Street; for Radio at 1709 Vine Street; and for Television at 7270 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California. She was a lifelong Republican and over the years supported such conservative men as Thomas E. Dewey , Dwight D. Eisenhower , Richard Nixon , Gerald Ford , Ronald Reagan , George Bush , and George W. Bush . She was even an honored guest and singer at a luncheon hosted at the White House by Mamie Eisenhower in 1954. Was a favorite singer of actor William Powell who collected everyone of her albums. Fellow jazz singer Billie Holiday once said in an interview that Stafford was her favorite music artist because she found her to be so ladylike.

Personal Quotes (2) [on her stage technique] "I just tried to remember the lyrics and not bump into the trumpet player." For the same reason that Lana Turner is not posing in bathing suits anymore. JS - when asked why she wouldn't come out of retirement Salary (1)

Question: Which US female singer who died in 2008 had hits with 'Shrimp Boats' and 'You Belong To Me'?
Answer: Jo Stafford