SINGER SPOTLIGHT: MARTHA TILTON - PART ONE

One of the most beautiful of the musical songbirds was the great  Martha Tilton. This bio of the Liltin' Martha Tilton was taken from a website dedicated to her. A link to the great website is provided below...

Born on November 14th, 1915, her family moved to Edna, Kansas a short time after; then, in 1922, they settled on Laurel Avenue in Los Angeles. Her father worked as a banker in Los Angeles. and he did well (considering this was during the Great Depression), he soon moved his family to a nice home at 507 Highland Avenue in Los Angeles. This is the home Martha's parents lived in for the remainder of their lives and which Martha only recently sold.

The Tiltons were a close-knit family; aunts and uncles and grandparents all lived within a few blocks of each other. Martha's mother played piano and her father had a beautiful singing voice, and the whole extended family loved to sing whenever they got together. Some of Martha's favorite singers at the time were Ruth Etting and Connee Boswell.

Martha also had a younger sister named Liz who was born in 1918, whom Martha claims was even prettier then she (although it's hard to believe). Liz was also a talented singer, singing with Jan Garber's orchestra in the mid-1940s and also Bob Crosby's band; her recordings are rare, so we have included a few on this site for your enjoyment (see "Audio" page). When Liz's husband returned from WWII, Liz left the music business. Liz passed away a few years ago, in 2003.

While Martha attended Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, she met up with a girl friend who had an older sister dating a fellow from U.S.C. college. These fellows had a small band that performed on a local radio station. She went on to sing at the Ambassador Hotel's Coconut Grove with Sid Lippman's Band.

In 1937, Martha joined the Jimmy Dorsey Band and spent a few months with that organization. During that time Dorsey recorded many records, but none included Martha unfortunately.

Still in 1937, she appeared in her first movie, the Roland Young film "Topper," with Cary Grant and Constance Bennett. She had an uncredited part as a lounge singer, fronting the group "Three Hits and a Miss."

Besides appearing in the movie "Topper," Martha also appeared in the films "Irene," "You'll Never Get Rich," "Sunny," "Strictly In The Groove," "Crime Inc.," "Swing Hostess" and "The Benny Goodman Story." Her last film, "The Queen of the Stardust Ballroom," was made in 1975. Most of these movies are available for purchase online.

While with "Three Hits and a Miss," Martha was the first girl singer to sing four-part harmony with a pop group. About this time, Benny Goodman was in Hollywood filming "Hollywood Hotel" and became aware of Martha, and she was asked to audition to replace Helen Ward. Goodman seemed to be going through a lot of girl singers at this time. Martha later commented that the band worked 365 days straight for two years, with no breaks. With that kind of a schedule, one can see why some singers and band members might leave looking for easier work hours.

During her years with Goodman, Martha made over 80 recordings--some really great, some pretty bad. According to Martha, Benny would record anything that came along, knowing his established popularity would make them hits. Unfortunately, performers like Martha who sang with a popular big band got little recognition. While she lent her beautiful voice to a recording (and without her voice, a song may not have been nearly as popular), Benny Goodman got the credit.

Early in her career with the Goodman organization, Martha was singing at the SunnyBrook Ballroom in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. When it came time for Benny to introduce her, he gave her a big buildup: "Here is a pretty gal from Hollywood that's really going places." But Martha missed her cue. When she didn't appear on stage, after a moment Benny ad-libbed, "She's not going places, she's already gone."

One of the biggest hits Martha had with Goodman was the song "And The Angels Sing." This tune was recorded on the spur of the moment, after the band had just come off a road trip. Johnny Mercer was still working on the lyrics as they went into the recording studio. After each take, Johnny would make changes and they'd do it all over again. Ziggy Elman, trumpet player, had a lengthy solo in the second half of the record; needless to say, after so many takes, his lips had taken a pretty bad beating.

After the song was put to bed, Martha commented to Harry James that this particular tune would never be a hit. Much to her surprise, she was wrong. "And The Angels Sing" is one of those songs that will endure forever and no one has ever sang it as beautifully as Martha. Of the many different recordings of the song she made over the years, I prefer the one done in 1955 with Capitol Records.

January 16, 1938 was a very special day; not just for Martha, but also for the Goodman organization and the wonderful music they brought to the world. That evening, the Goodman band broke tradition when they played swing music to a packed house at Carnegie Hall. Martha was 23 years old and must have felt a strong sense of fulfillment when she sang "Lock Lomond" and received the longest ovation of the entire evening. She also sang "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon." I believe this solidly set Martha as one of the great swing vocalists.

Martha's career with Goodman ended in April 1939, when the band broke up. This was bound to happen considering the rigorous schedule Goodman worked under. Also a number of strong solo performers had started out by working for Benny: Lionel Hampton, Harry James, Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa, to name a few; they were ready to make their own marks on the music world. The remaining members of the band were saddened by Martha's leaving. Louise Tobin, who was then married to Harry James, replaced her....

TO BE CONTINUED...

SOURCE

RIP: LOUISE TOBIN

Louise Tobin, the big band singer and ex-wife of Harry James, who helped to discover a young Frank Sinatra died on November 26th at her grand-daughter's home. She was 104. Tobin began singing professionally in her teens in the 1930s, working with notable bandleaders including Bobby Hackett (1915–1976) and Jack Jenney (1910–1945).

In 1939, she joined Benny Goodman’s (1909–1986) band, singing on hits including “I Didn’t Know What Time it Was” and “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” She married bandleader Harry James (1916–1983) in 1935; the marriage didn’t last long, but it did result in one important musical partnership. Tobin was listening to the radio in 1939 and heard a broadcast from the New Jersey club the Rustic Cabin. Their young emcee, Frank Sinatra, was singing, and she told James he should tune in another night to hear Sinatra’s skill. James was impressed and hired Sinatra as part of his band. The gig with James was the steppingstone to Sinatra’s meteoric rise to fame.

After their divorce, Ms. Tobin spent several years working in Los Angeles with bands led by pianist Emil Coleman and trumpeter Ziggy Elman before returning to Texas. Tobin took time off from her singing career to raise her children with James, but she returned to performing in the 1960s, including at the Newport Jazz Festival. In 1960 Tobin ran into Peanuts Hucko, a clarinetist who had played on her first recording in 1939 with Jack Jenney’s band. When Hucko opened his jazz club in Denver in 1967, he hired Tobin as his vocalist and she became his wife. They sold the restaurant in 1969 and Hucko led the Glenn Miller band in the early ‘70s and was also a favorite performer on the Lawrence Welk show. In the ‘80s the pair performed together in Hucko’s own band.

Although Tobin did not become the star that other singers did with Goodman’s band, she can be heard on several of the early recordings.Survivors include two sons, Harry James Jr. and Jerin Timothyray “Tim” James; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren...

MUSIC BREAK: BENNY GOODMAN - ALEXANDER'S RAGTIME BAND

MUSIC BREAK: BENNY GOODMAN - CARAVAN

SINGER SPOTLIGHT: ART LUND

One of the unsung greats of the big band era was vocalist Art Lund. Many of the vocalists of that era (other than Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Jo Stafford) have faded into obscurity after the big band era was over. However, after Lund was done with the bands he had a varied and interesting career.

Born Arthur London on April 1, 1915 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Lund was a popular baritone of the Big Band era whose recording of "Blue Skies" was an enduring hit throughout the 1940s. At 6 feet, 4 inches and with rugged good looks under a mop of blond hair, Lund also had a dramatic career in films, stage and television. 

He was a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University, and received his master's degree from the United States Naval Academy in aerological engineering. Lund was a high school math teacher in Kentucky who worked as a musician on the side. He left teaching to tour with Jimmy Ray and his band. He originally billed himself as Art London.

His recordings of "Blue Skies," "My Blue Heaven" and "Mam'selle" became the foundation of a career that began in the late 1930s with the Benny Goodman band. One of my favorite recordings Lund made during the big band era was the song "If You Build A Better Mousetrap" in 1941, a duet with fellow Goodman vocalist Peggy Lee. The song was taken from the Paramount movie The Fleet's In.

Lund was on Broadway first in the early 1950s in a musical adaptation of "Of Mice and Men" and later in "The Wayward Stork." He was seen across the country in touring companies of "Fiorello," "No Strings" and "Destry Rides Again." "The Most Happy Fella," the Frank Loesser adaptation of "They Knew What They Wanted," was one of Broadway's biggest hits of the 1950s.

In 1968, Lund moved into films as Frazier, biggest of "The Molly Maguires" in the picture about the Irish rebel miners. His other movies included "Ten Days Till Tomorrow," "Decisions, Decisions," "Bucktown" and "The Last American Hero."

On TV he was a frequent guest on "Gunsmoke," "Police Story," "The Rockford Files," "Little House on the Prairie" and "Daniel Boone."

Lund was still singing the 1980s. He was a frequent guest at Big Band nights in Southern California, toured with the Harry James ghost band and recently sang in Australia.

Art Lund died May 31, 1990 of liver cancer in Holladay, Utah...not far from where he was born. 

PEGGY LEE: THE EARLY YEARS

One of my favorite vocalists to come out of the big band era was the great songbird Peggy Lee. Her voice was as audio aspirin to anyone who had the pleasure of hearing. She was one of the biggest recording artists at Capitol Records in the 1940s and Decca Records in the 1950s, but I wanted to profil some of her earlier and formative years.

Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota on May 26, 1920, the seventh of eight children of Marvin Olof Egstrom, a station agent for the Midland Continental Railroad, and his wife Selma Amelia (Anderson) Egstrom. She and her family were Lutherans.^[Her father was Swedish American and her mother was Norwegian American.  Her mother died when Lee was just four years old. Afterward, her father married Min Schaumber, who treated her with great cruelty while her alcoholic father did little to stop it. Later, she developed her musical talent and took several part-time jobs so that she could be away from home.

Lee first sang professionally over KOVC radio in Valley City, North Dakota in the mid 1930s. . She later had her own series on a radio show sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her a salary in food. Both during and after her high school years, Lee sang for small sums on local radio stations. Radio personality Ken Kennedy, of WDAY in Fargo, North Dakota (the most widely heard station in North Dakota), changed her name from Norma to Peggy Lee.  Miss Lee left home and traveled to Los Angeles at the age of 17.

She returned to North Dakota for a tonsillectomy, and was noticed by hotel owner Frank Beringin while working at the Doll House in Palm Springs, California. It was here that she developed her trademark sultry purr – having decided to compete with the noisy crowd with subtlety rather than volume. Beringin offered her a gig at The Buttery Room, a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel East in Chicago. There, she was noticed by bandleader Benny Goodman. According to Lee, "Benny's then-fiancée, Lady Alice Duckworth, came into The Buttery, and she was very impressed. So the next evening she brought Benny in, because they were looking for a replacement for Helen Forrest. And although I didn't know, I was it. He was looking at me strangely, I thought, but it was just his preoccupied way of looking. I thought that he didn't like me at first, but it just was that he was preoccupied with what he was hearing." She joined his band in 1941 and stayed for two years.

In 1942 Lee had her first No. 1 hit, "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place", followed by 1943's "Why Don't You Do Right?" (originally sung by Lil Green), which sold over a million copies and made her famous. She sang with Goodman's orchestra in two 1943 films, Stage Door Canteen and The Powers Girl.

In March 1943 Lee married Dave Barbour, a guitarist in Goodman's band. Peggy said, "David joined Benny's band and there was a ruling that no one should fraternize with the girl singer. But I fell in love with David the first time I heard him play, and so I married him. Benny then fired David, so I quit, too. Benny and I made up, although David didn't play with him anymore. Benny stuck to his rule. I think that's not too bad a rule, but you can't help falling in love with somebody."When Lee and Barbour left the band, the idea was that he would work in the studios and she would keep house and raise their daughter, Nicki. But she drifted back to songwriting and occasional recording sessions for the fledgling Capitol Records in 1947, for whom she produced a long string of hits, many of them with lyrics and music by Lee and Barbour, including "I Don't Know Enough About You" (1946) and "It's a Good Day" (1947). With the release of the US No. 1-selling record of 1948, "Mañana", her "retirement" was over.

Thankfully Peggy did not stick to her retirement. Her time with the big bands was relatively short, but her tenure with the Benny Goodman Orchestra saw her emerging as a formidable vocalist. Her early years performing showed that she definitely had the talent, and it paved the way for her super stardom as a singer and jazz vocalists for decades to come...

SINGER SPOTLIGHT: HELEN WARD

I have a lot of favorite singers, being a music collector I seem to like them all. However, Big Band vocalist Helen Ward holds a special part in my heart as one of my favorites.  Born on September 19, 1913, Ward was taught to sing by her father who played piano. Later, she got singing gigs on the radio, performing on stations at WOR and WNYC. She also was a staff musician at WYNC.

She was singing with Enrique Madriguera's Latin Band in 1934 when the Goodman band was auditioning for an engagement at the Billy Rose Music Hall; she sang with the band at its second audition, and it got the job, although she did not join the Goodman band until a few months later. She also sang with the Goodman band on the radio program ''Let's Dance'' from December 1934 to May 1935; a series of recordings from that program was released by the Circle label a few years ago.

With the Goodman band, she recorded songs including ''Goody Goody,'' ''You Turned the Tables on Me,'' ''It's Been So Long'' and the million-seller ''These Foolish Things.'' She recorded ''All My Life'' and ''Too Good to Be True'' with the Goodman trio. Often, she would be handed the sheet music for a song the same day she performed it.

She and Benny had a brief romance and he came very close to proposing marriage to her in either 1935 or 1936. However, according to Ward in the documentary, Adventures in the Kingdom of Swing, he called it off at the last minute, citing his career. She married financier Albert Marx the following year and left the band.

After leaving the Goodman band, Ms. Ward turned to recording, appearing on albums with Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa, Bob Crosby, Joe Sullivan and Harry James. She toured with the band led by Hal McIntyre in 1942 and 1943, and recorded with Red Norvo, Harry James, Wild Bill Davison and Peanuts Hucko. In 1944 she joined Harry James's band. In 1946-47 she produced musical variety shows on WMGM in New York City.

She retired from regular performing in the late 1940's but rejoined Goodman for tours and recordings in 1953, 1957 and 1958. After her marriage to Marx ended, Ward later married the audio engineer William Savory. Savory was part of the team that invented the 33⅓ rpm long-playing record. Ward continued to do sporadic studio work and also worked briefly with Peanuts Hucko. Hucko and Ward issued a terrific album in 1958, which showed the Big Band songbird in fine voice. After that album, Ward pretty much retired. In 1979, she came out of retirement, performing at clubs including the Waldorf-Astoria's Starlight Roof and the Rainbow Room in New York City, and she made ''The Helen Ward Song Book'' (Lyricon) in 1981. That album is a wonderful album. Her voice now resembled jazz singer Lee Wiley. The album is one of my prized possessions, and I recommend any fan of Helen Ward or great jazz singing to try to listen to a copy.

Ward retired completely when her health began to fail. She passed away after a lengthy illness in Virginia on April 21, 1998. She was survived by her husband William Savory who later passed away in 2004. She was also survived by the countless recordings that she left behind…. 

RIP: JANE HARVEY

Jane Harvey, who recorded with the Benny Goodman orchestra in the 1940’s and later sang with Desi Arnaz, died at her home in Los Angeles Aug. 15. The cause was cancer. She was 88.

Born Phyllis Taff in Jersey City, NJ, on Jan. 6, 1925, she auditioned for nightclub owner Barney Josephson shortly after finishing high school, and was offered a gig at his celebrated Greenwich Village nightclub, Café Society. Before she took the stage, Josephson changed her name to Jane Harvey. Soon Benny Goodman came to hear her and subsequently hired her to record "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" with his band, in December 1944 for Columbia Records. She stayed with the band for six months, cutting tracks for the best-selling "Close as Pages in a Book," "Up in Central Park," "Only Another Boy and Girl" and "He’s Funny That Way." She joined the Desi Arnaz orchestra in 1946, recording several titles with him for RCA Victor, including "Mi Vida" and "A Rainy Night in Rio" and also appearing with him for a successful engagement at Ciro’s. When the band left to go on the road, she chose to remain at the club.

Ms. Harvey entertained the troops in Europe on a 1948 USO tour with Bob Hope and Irving Berlin. Upon returning to the States, she made her Broadway debut in the 1950 Harold Rome musical Bless You All with Pearl Bailey. She married record producer Bob Thiele and retired temporarily to raise their son.

In 1958, she sang two tracks with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Ms. Harvey recorded several albums through the years, including "Leave It to Jane," "I’ve Been There," the Fats Waller tribute "You Fats, Me Jane," "Jane Harvey" and "The Other Side of Sondheim." She resumed her cabaret career in 2011 with appearances at Feinstein’s in New York and the Catalina Jazz Club in Hollywood, and reissued five CDs of her previous recordings including an unreleased session that she had done with guitarist Les Paul. Harvey remarried and is survived by her husband William King, her son Bob Thiele Jr., daughter-in-law Amy Kanter Thiele, and a grandson, Owen Thiele...

INTERVIEW: BENNY GOODMAN

Here is a great interview with big band legend Benny Goodman. The interview took place in 1983, and Benny would die three days later. Goodman was one of the greatest clarinetists of all time...

BENNY GOODMAN - 1937

Here is one of the greatest bands of all time...Benny Goodman. Goodman and his Orchestra perform their classic "Sing,Sing,Sing". This clip was taken from the 1937 movie HOLLYWOOD HOTEL...