Word: ballads
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...shared in the pressing of something like $100 million worth of popular music. The product, boosted around the world by disk jockeys, record-players. TV, movies and old-fashioned stem-winding phonographs, is as ubiquitous as the American candy bar, the milkshake and the neon-lighted jukebox. And to ballad buyers, the voice of Rosemary Clooney, 24, has become as familiar as the voice of F.D.R. was to their parents...
...learn to read notes ("I can tell whether the tune goes up or down, but I can't tell how far"). She disdains such long-hair affectations as warming up her voice ("What have I got to warm up?"). But in common with the new postwar generation of ballad vendors, including such contemporaries as Patti Page (Mercury), Peggy Lee (Decca), Joni James (M-G-M), Jo Stafford and Doris Day (both Columbia), Rosemary knows how to put a song across...
...lisp. A word like "kiss" comes out a bit like "kish," and "caress" like "caresh." Like Bing Crosby, who attributed some of the distinctiveness of his early bu-bu-bu-boos to a node on his vocal cords, Clooney gets a sound that no competitor quite duplicates. In the ballad business, where distinctiveness is worth more than a clear high C, her voice is instantly recognizable...
Much of the ballad public, with a passion for oversimplification, prefers to believe that Rosemary Clooney was created overnight by one record, an Armenian-American calypso called Come On-a My House ("I'm gonna give-a you everything . . ."). Come On-a My House did make the public Clooney-conscious. Whipped up by Author William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian on a cross-country automobile junket more than ten years before-and purposely patterned after ancient Armenian folk songs-Come On-a went nowhere until Clooney's recording. Then it leaped from the ranks of the mere...
Rosemary Clooney does not have a "stage" voice. Like Dinah Shore and half a dozen other microphone buggers in this era of the electronic vocal, Rosemary has been turned down for Broadway shows. But by all the signs, her steady success is assured so long as the ballad business lives, as it lives today, by making records...