Stafford, Jo (Elizabeth)

Stafford, Jo (Elizabeth), American singer; b. Coalinga, Calif., Nov. 12, 1917. Stafford, a pure-voiced, classically trained contralto, was one of the most successful singers in popular music from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. Emerging from earlier work with the vocal group the Pied Pipers and as a bandsinger with Tommy Dorsey, she built a solo career on radio and television appearances and recordings, including 78 chart songs between 1944 and 1957, among them “Candy,” “You Belong to Me,” and “Make Love to Me!” She also maintained a pseudonymous career as a comedy singer.

Stafford’s parents, Grover Cleveland Stafford and Anna York Stafford, moved from Tenn, to Calif, shortly before her birth. She grew up in Long Beach while her father worked in the oil fields. Her mother was an accomplished five-string banjo player. She studied piano as a child and had five years of voice training as an adolescent. When she graduated from high school in 1935, she joined The Stafford Sisters, a vocal group featuring her older sisters, which worked on local radio and sang backgrounds on the soundtracks of film musicals.

The Stafford Sisters were heard in the Fred Astaire film A Damsel in Distress, released in November 1937, and appeared in Gold Mine in the Sky, released in June 1938. While they were doing backgrounds for the film Alexander’s Ragtime Band (eventually released in August 1938), Stafford began singing with two all-male vocal groups also working on the picture, the Four Esquires and the Three Rhythm Kings, and when one of her sisters married and retired, breaking up The Stafford Sisters, she and the other two groups formed an octet, The Pied Pipers. She also married one of the members, John Huddleston.

The group caught the attention of Paul Weston (real name Wetstein, 1912–96) and Axel Stordahl, arrangers for Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra, and they were hired to appear on Dorsey’s radio program in N.Y., debuting on The Raleigh-Kool Show on Dec. 28, 1938. They performed on the show for several weeks, then signed to RCA Victor Records and cut a couple of singles on June 6, 1939, but then returned to Calif, where attrition reduced them to a quartet. Dorsey then called to offer them a job with his band and they joined him in Chicago in December 1939.

The Pied Pipers’ first notable vocal on a Dorsey recording came with “I’ll Never Smile Again” (music and lyrics by Ruth Lowe), on which they accompanied Frank Sinatra; the record hit #1 in July 1940. From 1941 to 1943 they were also featured on such Top Ten hits as “Star Dust” (music by Hoagy Carmichael, lyrics by Mitchell Parish), “Do I Worry?” (music and lyrics by Stanley Cowan and Bobby Worth), “Dolores” (music by Louis Alter, lyrics by Frank Loesser), “Oh! Look at Me Now” (music by Joe Bushkin, lyrics by John De Vries), “Let’s Get Away from It All” (music by Matt Dennis, lyrics by Tom Adair), “Just as Though You Were Here” (music by John Benson Brooks, lyrics by Eddie DeLange), “There Are Such Things” (music and lyrics by Stanley Adams, Abel Baer, and George W. Meyer), and “It Started All Over Again” (music by Carl Fischer, lyrics by Bill Carey).

The Pied Pipers performed on Dorsey’s network radio shows, notably the Fame and Fortune series of 1940–41, and appeared with the Dorsey band in the films Las Vegas Nights (March 1941), Ship Ahoy (June 1942), and DuBarry Was a Lady (August 1943). Dorsey also occasionally featured Stafford on recordings, giving her first solo with “Little Man with a Candy Cigar” (music by Matt Dennis, lyrics by Townsend Brigham), recorded Feb. 7, 1941. She duetted with Sy Oliver on “Yes, Indeed!” (music and lyrics by Sy Oliver), which peaked in the Top Ten in August 1941.

The Pied Pipers left Dorsey in November 1942. Huddleston went into the army and was replaced by Hal Hooper, one of the original members when the group was an octet. Huddleston and Stafford divorced in 1943. Stafford took a job singing on the musical variety radio series The Colgate Program starring Al Jolson through June 1943, but she remained in the Pied Pipers, with whom she appeared on the radio series Johnny Mercer’s Music Shop from June to September. In August the Pied Pipers appeared in the film Gals, Incorporated.

Stafford and The Pied Pipers were each signed to Capitol Records and recorded their first session on Oct. 15, 1943, backed by an orchestra conducted by Paul Weston, Capitol’s musical director. Both sides of Stafford’s debut solo single, “Old Acquaintance” (music by Franz Waxman, lyrics by Kim Gannon) and “How Sweet You Are” (music by Arthur Schwartz, lyrics by Frank Loesser), reached the charts in January 1944. The Pied Pipers’ recording of “Mairzy Doats” (music and lyrics by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman, and Jerry Livingston) hit the Top Ten in April, but when both sides of Stafford’s second Capitol single, “I Love You” (music and lyrics by Cole Porter) and “Long Ago (And Far Away)” (music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Ira Gershwin), released the same month, took off for the Top Ten, she amicably left the group, which replaced her with June Hutton.

Both Stafford and the Pied Pipers were again featured on the Music Shop series, which resumed June 12 and continued through Dec. 8. She returned to the Top Ten with “It Could Happen to You” (music by James Van Heusen, lyrics by Johnny Burke) in September and her final single with The Pied Pipers, “The Trolley Song” (music and lyrics by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane), peaked in the Top Ten in December.

In her solo career, Stafford focused on radio and recordings, only rarely giving live performances. The week after leaving the Music Shop series in December 1944, she began hosting the weeknight series The Chesterfield Supper Club on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She cut back to just Tuesdays in 1948; the show ran through Sept. 2, 1949. She also hosted her own Jo Stafford Show from Nov. 9 to Dec. 25, 1945, and again from Nov. 11, 1948, to May 5, 1949. She costarred with Tony Martin on The Carnation Contented Hour from Oct. 2, 1949, to Dec. 30, 1951, and also appeared on other shows, notably Club Fifteen. She scored four Top Ten hits in 1945, the most successful of which was a duet with Johnny Mercer with the backing of the Pied Pipers on “Candy” (music and lyrics by Mack David, Joan Whitney, and Alex Kramer) that hit #1 in March.

There were another four Top Ten hits in 1946 and four more in 1947, among them “Temptation (Tim-Tayshun)” (music by Nacio Herb Brown, lyrics by Arthur Freed), a novelty performance on which she duetted with comic singer Red Ingle and the Natural Seven under the pseudonym Cinderella G. Stump; the record topped the charts in June 1947 and sold a million copies. Her only Top Ten hit of 1948 came with “Say Something Sweet to Your Sweetheart” (music and lyrics by Sid Tepper and Roy Brodsky), on which she was paired with Gordon MacRae. But her seven Top Ten hits in 1949, the most successful of which was “My Darling, My Darling” (music and lyrics by Frank Loesser), another pairing with MacRae that hit #1 in January, made her second only to Perry Como as the most successful recording artist of the year. She and MacRae also hit the Top Ten of the album charts in April 1949 with their set of songs from Cole Porter’s Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate.

In 1950, Stafford enjoyed three Top Ten singles, the most successful of which was “No Other Love,” which Paul Weston and Bob Russell based on Chopin’s “Etude No. 3 in E.” Weston left Capitol for Columbia Records, and Stafford followed him in the fall of 1950; they married in 1952 and had two children, Tim and Amy, both of whom became professional musicians.

The switch in record labels did not affect Stafford’s success: she had four Top Ten hits in 1951, notably “Shrimp Boats” (music and lyrics by Paul Mason Howard and Paul Weston); four in 1952, among them the long-running #1 “You Belong to Me” (music and lyrics by Pee Wee King, Redd Stewart, and Chilton Price); one, “Keep It a Secret” (music and lyrics by Jessie Mae Robinson) in 1953; and the chart-topping million-seller “Make Love to Me!” (music by Paul Mares, Leon Rappolo, Ben Pollack, George Brunies, Mel Stitzel, and Walter Melrose, lyrics by Bill Norvas and Allan Copeland) in 1954. She returned to radio with the weekday Jo Stafford Show from Jan. 19 to June 12, 1953, and appeared on the Chesterfield Supper Club during the 1954–55 season. And she had a weekly 15-minute television program, The Jo Stafford Show, from Feb. 2, 1954 to June 28, 1955; it earned her a 1954 Emmy nomination for Best Female Singer.

Stafford gradually cut back her professional activities from the mid-1950s. In 1957, in addition to her recordings under her own name, she joined Weston as the comically inept musical duo Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, initially on four cuts on his album The Original Piano Artistry of Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in Paris, released in 1960, won the Grammy for Best Comedy Performance, Musical. In 1961 she went to England and taped a musical television series for syndication. She re-signed to Capitol Records and rerecorded many of her earlier efforts in stereo, also cutting a religious album, Sweet Hour of Prayer, that earned her a 1964 Grammy nomination for Best Gospel or Other Religious Recording (Musical). She recorded for other labels during the 1960s as well. In the 1970s Paul Weston acquired her master recordings from Columbia and set up Corinthian Records to reissue them.

Discography

Music of My Life (1940); Jo Stafford with Gordon MacRae (1949); Autumn in New York (1950); Songs of Faith (1950); Songs for Sunday Evening (1950); American Folk Songs (1950); As You Desire Me (1952); Starring Jo Stafford (1953); Broadway’s Best (1953); My Heart’s in the Highland (1954); Garden of Prayers (1954); Happy Holiday (1955); Soft and Sentimental (1955); Guys and Dolls (1955); A Girl Named Jo (1956); Once Over Lightly (1957); Songs of Scotland (1957); Swingin’ Down Broadway (1958); Ballad of the Blues (1959); Jo + Jazz (1960); Whispering Hope (1962); Sweet Hour of Prayer (1964); This is Jo Stafford (1966).

—William Ruhlmann