Word: clooney
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...words & music might have been a mild shock to turn-of-the-century parishioners, but they were everyday business-and mighty good business-to Columbia Records, which leased old Adams Presbyterian five years ago for a recording studio. And for Rosemary Clooney, the long-legged blonde at the microphone, it was nothing more or less than her millions of fans have come to expect. Clooney and Columbia are partners in a booming U.S. business which can best be described as the manufacture and sale of the American ballad...
...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...
Putting It Across. By Metropolitan Opera standards, Songstress Clooney is as innocent of musical training as a rose-breasted grosbeak. She never bothered to 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...
Turks in the Well. The Clooney voice is known to the trade as both "barrelhouse" and blue, i.e., robust and fresh, with an undercurrent of seductiveness. It can spin out a slow tune with almost cello-like evenness, or take on a raucous bite in a fast rhythm. In a melancholy mood, it has a cinnamon flavor that tends to remind fans of happier days gone by-or soon to come. Moreover, thanks to the malocclusion of the Clooney jaw, her voice carries just a hint of a lisp. A word like "kiss" comes out a bit like "kish...
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...