A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers by Will Friedwald

Author:Will Friedwald [Friedwald, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-37989-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

Dinah Shore (1916–1994)

Dumb joke from the movie version of On the Town: Our hapless sailor heroes somehow wind up at the Museum of Natural History and accidentally knock over the skeleton of a dinosaur. A pair of cops are summoned to the scene via the police radio, which orders them to investigate the collapse of a dinosaur. “That’s terrible about the collapse of Dinah Shore,” says one cop, with a perfectly straight face. “She’s my favorite singing star.”

In a kooky way, that’s as good a description of Dinah Shore’s career as anyone has offered. She was indeed a “singing star,” a star who happened to sing, as opposed to someone like Jo Stafford, a singer who happened also to be a star. Without demeaning Shore’s vocal abilities, she lasted at the top for so many decades primarily because she was selling personality first and music second. The important thing with her was that you liked her; more than anything, she was a warm and friendly person whose company you wanted to be in. You wanted to be around when she chatted with her guests—whether it was on her variety show of the forties, fifties, and sixties (first on radio, then TV) or her afternoon talk show of the seventies and eighties. If she could capture our attention with a song, so much the better. But no one was shocked when she launched her own talk show and put her singing on the back burner. She was just as engaging when she was stir-frying with Sinatra in the mid-seventies as when she was singing with him in earlier decades.

Broadcasting was always Shore’s thing: She made movies, but they never amounted to much. She was more than attractive, but never movie-star glamorous like Doris Day. As she once said, “A singer [in the movies] was usually ‘pretty pretty’ [like Alice Faye] or a comedienne [like Martha Raye], and I was neither.” Still, this didn’t seem to hurt her longevity on television, a medium that relied at least partly on visual appeal. Where you spent time with Doris Day on two or three occasions a year, when her new movies were out, Shore was a consistent presence in your home on the radio, not only starring on her own shows but appearing as a guest on everyone else’s; you spent time with Dinah at least two or three nights a week, and she continued, without a letup into television, variety shows and then talk shows, for an unabated run of over forty years. Chances are that when anybody, not just a dumb cop in a movie, said “singing star” for the whole middle of the twentieth century, they meant Dinah Shore, who exemplified that ideal more than anyone else.

Shore isn’t associated with any particular innovations; she left it to Sinatra to experiment with long-breath phrasing, the discovery of the standard songbook, the invention of the concept album. Yet darned if Sinatra didn’t delight in being in her company, working with her on radio and TV (and several famous Columbia recording sessions) every chance she gave him.

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