Autumn In New York: Jo Stafford

Jo Stafford: Pied Pipers

Three different clips I found that I combined into one:

1. Tommy Dorsey and the Pied Pipers join Frank on "Last Call For Love" from a 1942 video. 2. Tommy and the band kid around with a tune titled 'Trombone Man" until Buddy Rich gets serious with a drum solo. 3. This was Frank's first brief movie appearance in 1941 singing "I'll Never Smile Again"

About the Pied Pipers:

Originally consisting of eight members, The Pied Pipers had their greatest success after nearly half of the members left the group. The remaining Pipers (Billy Wilson, Chuck Lowry, Jo Stafford, and her then-husband John Huddleston) joined the Tommy Dorsey Band in 1939, backing Sinatra on many classic recordings. In 1942 The Pied Pipers broke away from Dorsey, and Huddleston joined the army, to be replaced by Hal Hopper, one of the original eight members. The group backed Johnny Mercer on several tracks during the early 40s, including "Candy" and "Blues in the Night." Their first single ("Deacon Jones"/"Pistol Packin' Mama") was released in 1943. Stafford had become quite busy with her solo career and left the group in 1944, to be replaced by June Hutton. Throughout the rest of the decade The Pied Pipers charted frequently, yet their popularity waned in the '50s.
"Dream" is a great (all accompanied) collection of 26 original mono recordings from 1939 to 1949, featuring vocals by Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, Connie Hanes and Johnny Mercer. The history of this popular 3-man, 1 woman quartet is complex and interesting, (and well-covered in the liner notes), but it's clear the group took off when they were hired in Chicago by Tommy Dorsey to sing with his band in 1939. The next year he hired Sinatra, the wisdom of this quickly becoming clear in The Voice/Pipers hit "I'll Never Smile Again," which enjoyed 12 weeks at #1 on the US pop chart. The group went on to have 11 more hits on RCA Victor, many featuring Sinatra, including #2 success "Oh, Look at Me Now!" with Connie Haines sharing the solos, Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust" and the chart-topping "Dolores," but 3 years later they broke with the hotheaded Dorsey as their #1 hit with Sinatra, "There Are Such Things" was filling the airwaves. The CD has 5 hits pre-Dorsey, including "Polly Wolly Doodle All The Day" and the title tune "Dream;" 7 with Dorsey, Sinatra and Haines, including "Let's Get Away From It All; 9 with Paul Weston and Orchestra including "The Trolley Song" with Jo Stafford and "Candy" with Johnny Mercer and Stafford; and 3 with Skip Martin and His Orchestra, including "Kiss Me Goodnight." Some of the best big-band swing music we've ever heard, fresh and hot from the 30s and 40s!

Jo Stafford: NPR Interview

Images combined with audio from a 1988 npr interview of Jo Stafford and Paul Weston by Terri Gross

Paul Weston (born Paul Wetstein, March 12, 1912 – died September 20, 1996) was a US pianist, arranger, composer and conductor. Weston was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1933.
Weston became an arranger for Rudy Vallee's Fleischman Hour on radio. In 1936 he joined the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra as chief arranger, holding the position until 1940. He then became Dinah Shore's arranger/conductor and also worked freelance for the Bob Crosby Orchestra. His association with the Crosby unit took him to Hollywood and into film work, starting with Holiday Inn in 1941. Subsequent films as musical director include Holiday Inn (1942), Belle of the Yukon (1944) and Road To Utopia (1945). Weston arranged Ella Fitzgerald's album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook (1957), devoted to the music of Irving Berlin.
In 1942, songwriter Johnny Mercer, Glenn Wallichs and Buddy DeSylva formed Capitol Records and engaged Weston as musical director for the label. Weston also began working on radio with Mercer and Capitol songstress Jo Stafford. Stafford signed with Columbia Records in 1950 and Weston also joined Columbia. In 1952, Weston and Stafford married and had two children, Tim (born 1954) and Amy (born 1956).
Weston had a long career as a musical director for television including The Danny Kaye Show. He teamed up with his wife to produce a series of comedy albums based on Jo's ability to sing off-key deliberately while Paul murdered the piano accompaniment. They assumed the personas of "Jonathan and Darlene Edwards" for these musical travesties.
The couple retired from performing in the 1970s. Weston died on September 20, 1996, in Santa Monica, California. In 2006, Jo Stafford donated her husband's library and her own to the University of Arizona. She died in 2008.

Jo Stafford: Obituary

An excellent and very cleverly put together performance with Ella. The choice of songs may have come from personal experiences. Jo's nytimes obituary:

July 19, 2008, Jo Stafford, Wistful Voice of WWII Era, Dies at 90, By STEPHEN HOLDEN
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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!”

Autumn Songs: Jo Stafford and Rosemary Clooney

The great Jo Stafford died at 90 on 7/18/08
Autumn Leaves, Lyrics by Johnny Mercer and Music by Kosma Berger

The falling leaves drift by my window
The falling leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sunburned hands I used to hold
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall
I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall

Tis Autumn, words & music by Robert Nemo

Old Father time checked, so there'd be no doubt;
Called on the North wind to come on out,
Then cupped his hands so proudly to shout,
“La-di-dah di-dah-di-dum, ‘tis autumn!'
Trees say they're tired, they've born too much fruit;
Charmed on the wayside, there's no dispute.
Now shedding leaves, they don't give a hoot –
La-di-dah di-dah-di-dum, ‘tis autumn!
Then the birds got together to chirp about the weather
Mmmm-mmm-mmm-mmm.
After makin' their decision, in birdie-like precision,
Turned about, and made a beeline to the south.
My holding you close really is no crime –
Ask the birds and the trees and old Father Time.
It's just to help the mercury climb.
La-di-dah di-dah-di-dum, ‘tis autumn.