Sing It to Me

Singer Margaret Whiting was born with a silver tuning fork in her hand. Her father, Songwriter Richard A. Whiting (Till We Meet Again, Japanese Sandman, Sleepy Time Gal) was already a big moneymaker in the Pianola, windup phonograph and battery-radio era of popular music. Her aunt and namesake, raucous-voiced Vaudevillian Margaret Young, introduced such ragtime hits as Nobody's Sweetheart Now and Way Down Yonder in New Orleans. Sophie Tucker was little Margaret's red-hot godmamma.

Last week plump, 25-year-old Maggie Whiting herself was one of the big names in popular music. Her recording of Slipping Around, made with Western Singer Jimmy Wakely, was Capitol Records' top seller for the past year (1,750,000 copies). Billboard announced that next to Evelyn (A Little Bird Told Me) Knight, Maggie was queen of the jukeboxes for 1949.

Sweet & Slow. Margaret's reputation as a singer has been a long time in the making. She began at three, singing the

Dick Whiting tunes made famous by such stars as Nora Bayes, Maurice Chevalier and Eddie Cantor. By the time she was 14, Family Friend Johnny Mercer decided that Margaret's velvety voice was good enough for a guest spot on his radio show. By 1941, 17-year-old Maggie had struck out on her own, got on Lucky Strike's Your Hit Parade. But her sweet and slow singing did not please irascible Tobacco Huckster George Washington Hill, who "liked 'em loud and fast." She was fired after four weeks.

Margaret took to the road as vocalist with a dance band, soon learned that "it doesn't matter how sweet you sing, you're lost if you don't feel the beat and send it into your audience." In addition to the beat, she picked up her own silky, just-between-us-two way with a song. "You have to sing it to one person," she says. "The listener has to feel, 'Why, she's singing it to me.' '

A Warm Spot. In the past five years Margaret's sing-it-to-me has lifted her income into the $200,000-a-year class, and many a song (It Might as Well Be Spring, A Tree in the Meadow, Faraway Places) on to the hit parade. She has helped bring back the vogue for tandem singing by doubling with Wakely, Jack Smith, Bob Hope and Bandleader Frank DeVol. Says Los Angeles Disc Jockey Gene Norman: "Margaret could sing a duet with a talking horse and make him sound good."

Since her father's death in 1938, Margaret has always kept a warm spot in her repertory for his songs, has successfully revived such Whiting hits as My Ideal and My Future Just Passed. Last week between television and radio shows Margaret was making plans for an album of Whiting singing Whiting. She also had plans to launch her own company, to issue some of the 150 songs her father never managed to get published.

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