Sometime after I discovered big band music I really discovered Jo Stafford. She had the most divinely studio voice. A pure, opera-trained soprano and what they called a natural falsetto. Sultry and enchanting and she somehow always seemed to keep her distance from you, too. Even as you thought, if you squinted real hard and you imagined this was an old fuzzy AM radio and you weren’t always in such a climate-controlled environment that the “you” in her songs just might, in fact, be you.
Well.
Today I was looking for something else and I discovered that in 1961 Stafford and her husband were in London. They produced a nine-show series there. (There was a variety show in the U.S. in the 1950s) And I discovered that the great Ella Fitzgerald did a medley with Stafford.
Can you even?
Yes, you can:
Fitzgerald was the first black musician to win a Grammy. She’d win 12 more and sale more than 40 million records. Stafford had a Grammy. And midway through her career she was tapped as the best-selling female singer in the world.
Now, 1940s Jo Stafford is my favorite. By the time she was making the rounds on television she was in her mid-30s and on. Here she is with Bing Crosby in 1959 and it is incredible, but the whimsy of youth is replaced with the confidence that comes with well-earned wisdom. The one-liners come with their own answers and have a little skepticism and acid in them:
She’s able to not be overwhelmed by Bing, and he was kind enough to let her stay up there where she belonged.
This is 15 years previous, in a 1944 movie. She had six top 20 hits that year. She would have been 27 or 28 then, and The Pied Pipers had been working on these tight harmonies for about six years. She had no idea of the complete arc of her career then:
Because here’s Jo Stafford in the 1970s … she’d been doing a parody act for a long time with her husband. That was where her Grammy came from, a 1960s comedy record. She had what might have been one of the first alter-egos in pop music. “Darlene Edwards” was a hapless lounge act sort. And this was a 1979 hit:
Hard to reconcile that this is the same voice. This was her biggest hit:
Not hard to see why.
