[Trombone-l] Jo Stafford

[billdin@comcast.net]

Jonathan and Darlene Edwards. Wow! What a concept. I remember laughing myself silly listening to their awful but wonderful records during my college years. We would put these recordings on the cafeteria PA system and the music jocks would be paralyzed with laughter, while in the other sections, where the "normal people" sat....no reaction. This only confirmed the general opinion that music students were beyond strange. Now and then someone from the "normal" group would come up to us and ask where they could get that great record. They were serious.

Jo Stafford and Paul Weston. They were so hip......Long may they wave!

Jo Stafford, 90, an exceptionally versatile singer who worked with Frank 
Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey and the Pied Pipers and shared a Grammy Award with her 
conductor husband for their parody of a tone-deaf lounge act, died yesterday at 
her home in Century City, Calif. She had congestive heart failure.

Singer Judy Collins once said Stafford's poignant interpretation of folk ballads 
was pivotal to her own career in folk music. Although she made several acclaimed 
folk recordings, Stafford was mostly known as a pop vocalist with a warm, clean 
voice that music critic Terry Teachout called 'rhythmically fluid without ever 
sounding self-consciously 'jazzy.' '

>From 1944 to 1954, Stafford placed nearly 75 songs in the pop charts as a solo 
entertainer. She was especially well-regarded for her versions of pop ballads, 
including ' You Belong to Me,' ' Make Love to Me,' ' Autumn Leaves' and 'All the 
Things You Are.'

A lifelong mischievous streak also led her to make cornball novelties of the 
day, including a mock hillbilly version of ' Temptation' (which she pronounced 
'Tim-tayshun'), ' Shrimp Boats' and ' Jambalaya.'

Although largely a solo artist, she recorded with singers Perry Como, Frankie 
Laine, Gordon MacRae, Johnny Mercer and Dick Haymes.

She was inexhaustible as a performer and became a favorite of service members 
who saw her tour bases and hospitals during World War II and the Korean War. She 
also participated in a high-profile American-led effort to beam pop music and 
propaganda throughout Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

She earned the nickname 'G.I. Jo' but jokingly called herself 'Miss Outgoing 
Freight,' a War Department euphemism for artillery shells and tanks sent to the 
front lines.

She was a staple of television variety shows in the 1950s and briefly hosted her 
own program on CBS-TV with a band conducted by her husband, Paul Weston, music 
director of Capitol Records.

For years, they had privately developed for friends a comedy routine satirizing 
bad entertainers. Music executives urged them to record under their adopted 
persona of two clueless nightclub performers, Jonathan and Darlene Edwards.

The result was several hit records that triggered a national sensation: trying 
to identify the artists behind the brazenly off-key singing and piano playing of 
dubious ability and taste.

Some thought they were Margaret and Harry Truman, Time magazine reported.

The liner notes to the Edwardses' debut album were deadpan: 'Mr. Edwards places 
what he calls 'emotional honesty' first in importance. He believes that 
technical accuracy, slavish adherence to original harmonies and melody are 
secondary. Mrs. Edwards returned from private life to take part in this album, 
selecting her own repertoire of sophisticated songs, several of which she 
originally introduced in Trenton, N.J.'

Their mangled interpretations of popular songs led to several albums through the 
1970s, including versions of 'Stayin' Alive' and 'I Am Woman.'

Their second release as the fictitious duo, 'Jonathan and Darlene in Paris,' won 
the 1960 Grammy for best comedy performance.

To make the burlesque work required a delicate balance of ability and inability, 
or as columnist Don Freeman wrote in the San Diego Union-Tribune, 'fumbling 
incompetence, performed with enormous skill.'

Jo Elizabeth Stafford was born Nov. 12, 1917, in Coalinga, Calif., near Fresno, 
where her father worked in the oil fields. She was raised in Long Beach, Calif., 
and received professional voice training.

After completing high school, she joined her two older sisters, Christine and 
Pauline, who appeared on radio as a country-western singing act. The Stafford 
Sisters performed on a local station and won Hollywood studio work as background 
vocalists.

In 1938, while on the set of the movie musical 'Alexander's Ragtime Band,' she 
recalled, 'We had to do a lot of waiting and sitting around between takes, so 
seven boys from a group called the Esquires and another called the Rhythm Kings 
began harmonizing with one another.'

The singers teamed to form the Pied Pipers, and their talent caught the 
attention of Paul Weston and Axel Stordahl, then arrangers for the popular 
Dorsey band. Reduced to a quartet, the Pied Pipers soon joined Dorsey full-time 
and gained fame backing the band's new singer, Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra and the Pied Pipers had a chart-topping success for 12 weeks with 'I'll 
Never Smile Again,' one of their many hits. In 1942, Stafford cut her first solo 
record, 'Little Man With a Candy Cigar,' and quit Dorsey with other members of 
the Pied Pipers. The singing group had developed a popularity independent of 
Dorsey and appeared on radio programs hosted by Sinatra, Bob Crosby and Johnny 
Mercer.

In 1944, Mercer signed Stafford to Capitol Records, where she thrived during the 
next several years as a solo artist on record and radio. She also reconnected 
with Weston, then Capitol's music director, and whom she married in 1952. Her 
first marriage, to Pied Piper John Huddleston, ended in divorce.

Weston died in 1996. Survivors include their children, Tim Weston of Topanga, 
Calif., and Amy Wells of Calabasas, Calif.; a sister; and four grandchildren.

In 1950, when Stafford signed with Columbia Records, her manager negotiated a 
clause giving her rights to the master recordings. Because of that foresight, 
she had no trouble in later decades reissuing many of her hits through 
Corinthian Records, a company Weston started.

Stafford's family said she happily retired in the mid-1960s when she no longer 
found the music industry 'fun.' For many years, she and her husband involved 
themselves in charity work, and Stafford also led an organization helping 
mentally handicapped children.

-Bill Dinwiddie
billdin at comcast.net