Girlish Voice

Cindy has one blue eye; she also has one brown,

One eye looks at the country; the other one looks in town.

Last week this old Tennessee ballad, Cindy, was worn thin on the turntables of 1,000 radio disc jockeys. Listeners wrote new Cindy lyrics and sent them to the radio stations. First prize in the contest was a trip to Manhattan to meet Songbird Jo Stafford.

Stunts like this have shot Jo Stafford, the fastest-rising girl singer in the U.S., into the big money. Her rise is typical of.singing stardom in 1946. Three years ago she was just the girl's voice in the Pied Pipers, a screechy quartet that used to sing with Tommy Dorsey. And she was fat. When she was eight, she weighed as much as Frank Sinatra does now. By the time she joined Dorsey's band she weighed 186.

She got $100 a week, singing Embraceable You and I'll Never Smile Again. Says she: "I spent most of the time thinking up clever ways to lie down in a Greyhound bus." On one-night stands, she sometimes traveled 500 miles with her hair in pin curls and her evening dress over her arm so it wouldn't get mussed. The trick was to arrive in a town at 7 p.m., get your dress pressed and your hair fixed, and look fresh by 9 p.m. She thinks the training was tough but good: "If you can sing on one-night stands into bad microphones to out-of-tune pianos you can sing any place."

In three years with Tommy Dorsey she learned to copy "those long phrases without breathing" from Dorsey's trombone. One of her loyal fans was Songwriter Johnny Mercer. In 1943 Mercer signed her for his Capitol Records.

Singing to Shrimp. Before she could make the big time, Jo needed glamorizing. Thyroid pills and strict dieting cut her down to 135 pounds in six months. ("No matter how much grass you eat, those hot rolls and butter are what you miss.") To give her a widow's-peak hairline, a hairdresser yanked out chunks of her hair. The rest of her hair, which was once brown, was dyed red.

Her manager booked her into a fancy Manhattan cellar, La Martinique. She hated it. "The first show everybody's eating shrimp while you're singing your heart out. The second show they're all slightly tight. The third show they're loaded." She went from there to the Paramount Theater and later a 26-week contract alternating with Perry Como on radio's Chesterfield Supper Club. Soon she was rated the most-listened-to female vocalist and was the most frequently photographed sweater girl in radio. Her recording of Symphony sold 500,000 records. Her 1945 income: $125,000. She now tops all popular girl singers but velvet-voiced, $250,000-a-year Dinah Shore.

No Boops, No Baby Talk. Jo Stafford's style is also typical of popular singing, 1946 model. The days of Helen Kane's boop-boop-a-doop, Helen Morgan's teary-voiced moaning or Bonnie Baker's baby talk are past. The style,now--practiced also by Margaret Whiting and Peggy Lee --is to sing straight, and let the band do the fancy work. Her detractors say Jo Stafford sings like a pitch pipe.

The best up-&-coming girl with a style all her own is doe-voiced Evelyn Knight, who has a pull in Manhattan's plushiest nightclubs second only to Hildegarde. She made a hit by singing with soft assurance such old-fashioned tunes as Grandfather's Clock and a streamlined version of Buffalo Gals called Dance with a Dolly ("with a hole in her stocking"). Newest favorite at Greenwich Village's famed Cafe Society Downtown is Sarah Vaughn, a pianist turned vocalist, who swoops up & down and around the melody in East of the Sun and Body and Soul. Some students of the subject say she is the freshest Negro talent since Ella Fitzgerald, the tisket-a-tasket girl, who is the easiest-riding rhythm singer in the business. Another promising Negress: slinky Pearl Bailey, who stops the show with Legalize My Name in Broadway's St. Louis Woman.

Some of the greats of yesterday and the day before are still going strong. Among them: buxom Mildred (Rockin' Chair) Bailey, the best "white gal" blues singer of her time; contralto Connee Boswell; satin-voiced Maxine Sullivan; and the unhappy queen of the 52nd Street honky tonks, Billie (Strange Fruit) Holiday. Most of them have been around long enough to see several debutante classes come & go.

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