Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Jo Stafford, died on July 16, 2008, aged 90. She not only had one of the most pure, wide-ranging voices in American popular song - adored by wartime servicemen, who dubbed her “GI Jo” - but also the ability to parody appalling, off-key vocalizing under the guises of Darlene Edwards and Cinderella G Stump.
She first came to notice as one of the Pied Pipers group which backed Frank Sinatra on his early recordings with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in the late 1930s, and she made a decisive retirement in the early 1960s.
Her wartime fame might suggest an American Vera Lynn, but admirers thought her possessed of greater range, wit and subtlety.
It was a style neither cool nor jazz, but nor was it bland; and if not exactly seething, she was certainly not merely the girl-next-door in her approach. She could always surprise.
Jo Elizabeth Stafford was born on November 12 1917 at Coalinga, a one-horse town between San Francisco and Los Angeles, to which her father Grover Cleveland Stafford had brought the family from Gainesboro, Tennessee, in the hope of making a fortune from oil.
He managed only to find a series of mediocre jobs which were scarcely to see them through the Depression.
Among them was one at Miss Hall’s School, a private finishing-school for girls.
Jo always remembered his being allowed to bring home the school phonograph on Christmas and hear a disc of the old song Whispering Hope.
Her mother, Anne, had been an adroit performer on the five-string banjo, and the folk music of Tennessee was to remain an influence on Jo’s voice and some of her later repertoire.
Meanwhile, at school, she spent five years in classical training, with the notion that she might become an opera singer, but she realized that it would require even more time than that, and there was a living to be earned in the meantime.
She was the third of four sisters, two of them, Pauline and Christine, being 14 and 11 years older than her. With them, she formed a singing group, such sibling ensembles being typical of the time.
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