Pop Hopefuls

To keep the pop-music business popping, record makers and agents nurture promising young singers with the elaborate care that race-track trainers lavish on two-year-olds. When young singers are signed, they usually get new, tongue--tempting names, are advised how to dress and behave before the great public and carted off to woo the hit-making disk jockeys in a well-traveled circuit of key pop cities: Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh (neither New York nor Washington is regarded as a reliable pop town). If, as a result, a singer "lights the board" in a key city, the rush to build a new hit is on. Some of the potential future hitmakers now being hopefully groomed by the industry:

JOHNNY MATHIS, 21, who was a San Francisco State College sophomore and a high-jump star when Columbia Records heard him singing in his spare time in a San Francisco nightclub. His first, heavily jazz-oriented album limped along un-spectacularly; his first single, Wonderful, Wonderful, attracted scant attention at first. Then it began to light boards in San Francisco and Boston and edge up onto the bestseller charts in the trade press. Another single, It's Not for Me to Say made the charts, too (No. 16 last week).

Currently, to see if he is a lasting hitmaker, Columbia is trying out Mathis and his husky, finely phrasing voice on a new album of ballads.

MILTON ALLEN, 20, a lanky guitarist out of Houston who represents RCA Victor's latest bid for the rocking teen-age market. A panting, heavy-dew singer, Milton was spotted by RCA fieldmen while he was stomping it out on local Houston radio shows. He was hustled to New York, shorn of his Elvis Presley locks, fitted into a grey flannel suit and photographed in Central Park, looking sincere. RCA is pushing him with the trade on two newly released singles: Just Look, Don't Touch, She's Mine and Love A, Love A Lover.

CONNIE FRANCIS, born Constance Franconero, who broke into a network show with a kid act when she was four, later graduated to the Catskill Borsch circuit--the Concord, Grossinger's, Brown's Hotel. M-G-M Records liked her throaty, sob-ridden voice, changed her name and signed her up. Her first two singles--Freddy and Didn't I Love You Enough? are currently being followed by a bouncy number, Eighteen, and a sad-toned ballad Faded Orchid, which might go over with what the industry calls the "girdle set," i.e., 30 to 45.

JANIS DARLENE MARTIN, 17, a onetime Virginia country girl to whom Victor hopes to transfer some of the Elvis Presley appeal. A veteran of such folksy outfits as the Dixie Playboys and the Shenandoah Valley Boys, Darlene was signed on the basis of a demonstration record, loaded aboard the Victor March of Dimes train for a tour of the country. Her high, nasal voice and tub-thumping beat went over big at whistle stops and local auditoriums. Two of her singles--My Boy Elvis and Little Bit--got on the charts, and with her latest disk, Love Me to Pieces, just out, Victor is publicizing her as the "female Presley."

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