Jo Stafford

Here is a most famous song performed by legendary jazz singer Jo Stafford.
Jo Stafford (1917-2008) had a career that spanned the late 1930s through the early 1960s. Stafford is greatly admired for the purity of her voice and was considered one of the most versatile vocalists of the era. She was also viewed as a pioneer of modern musical parody, having won a Grammy Award for best comedy album in 1961 (with husband Paul Weston) for their album Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in Paris. Originally, she wanted to become an opera singer and studied voice as a child. However, because of the economic Great Depression, she abandoned that idea and joined her sisters Christine and Pauline in a popular vocal group, The Stafford Sisters, which performed on Los Angeles radio station KHJ. When her sisters married, the group broke up and Stafford joined a new vocal group, The Pied Pipers. The group became very popular, working on local radio and movie soundtracks, and caught the attention of two of Tommy Dorsey's arrangers, Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston. The group backed Frank Sinatra in some of his early recordings. In 1942, the group had an argument with Dorsey and left, but in 1943 it became one of the first groups signed to Johnny Mercer's new label, Capitol Records. Capitol's music director was the same Paul Weston who had been instrumental in introducing Stafford to Dorsey. Weston and Stafford married in 1952. In 1944, Stafford left the Pied Pipers to go solo. Her tenure with the USO, in which she gave countless performances for soldiers stationed overseas, acquired her the nickname "GI Jo". In 1948 Stafford and Gordon MacRae had a million-seller with their version of Say something sweet to your sweetheart and in 1949 repeated their success with My happiness. In 1950, she left Capitol for Columbia Records, then returning to Capitol in 1961. At Columbia, she was the first recording artist to sell twenty-five million records. During her second stint at Capitol, Stafford also recorded for Frank Sinatra's Reprise label. In the 1950s, she had a string of popular hits with Frankie Laine, six of which charted. It was also at this time that Stafford scored her best known hits with huge records like Jambalaya, Shrimp boats, Make love to me and You belong to me. The last song was Stafford's all-time biggest hit, topping the charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom (the first song by a female singer to top the UK chart). In 1966, Stafford went into semi-retirement, retiring completely from the music business in 1975. Stafford wouldn't perform again until 1990, at a ceremony honoring Frank Sinatra.
Enjoy Jo Stafford's elegance and unique style!

Suddenly there's a valley