Word: pauls
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...sell the sound to a mass audience, the one man needed one woman: a vocalist. Gene Autry recommended a singer who had worked with him, Colleen Summers. Paul and Summers were lovers from 1946, though they didn't marry until the end of 1949, back in Milwaukee. (Paul got his blood test from the father of Steve Miller, the blues-guitar man.) Summers was with Paul when their car crashed and he broke his back, both collarbones, six ribs and his nose. His right arm and elbow were crushed. Doctors suggested it be amputated, but he said no, so they...
...Paul had thought that Summers, schooled in country, would not feel at ease singing the jazz-inflected pop he wanted to play. But he finally decided that his domestic partner could be his professional one. For a two-star act, she needed a name nearly as short and simple as his; thus Mary Ford. They hit immediately: five Top 10 hits ("Tennessee Waltz," "Mockin' Bird Hill," "How High the Moon," "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise" and "Whispering") in nine months. From August 1952 to March '53, they scored five more Top 10 hits ("My Baby's Coming Home...
...High the Moon For all the attention paid to Les Paul the technical innovator, not enough was paid to his skill as an arranger of guitar solos and vocal parts. Similarly, Ford didn't get her due as a singer. She looked the way she sang: smooth, clear, pretty. Her voice, tripled or sextupled in harmony, was the vocal version of his slide-guitar style. Her glissandi were intimate, as if she had been singing inside the microphone. (She was, in fact, the first vocal artist to sing not a foot or so away from the microphone, as most studio...
...Right from the start, Paul's arrangement has more hooks than a Chicago abattoir. ("We used to start our gigs with the opening riffs from 'How High the Moon,' " said another Paul, the one with the Beatles. "Everybody was trying to be a Les Paul clone in those days.") Do you remember that descending pattern (C, C7, F, F-minor, G) that concluded primal rock-'n'-roll numbers like Billy Haley's "Rock Around the Clock"? Here, Paul begins with that lick; he also anticipates and reverses the fade-out ending of so many early rock-'n'-roll songs...
...Then Ford takes over with her menthol-smooth voice, multiplied into three-part harmony by Paul's studio gizmonics. She coos, "Somewhere there's mu-u-u-sic," coaxing four syllables out of the word by gliding over them rather than hiccuping through them. She wants the listener to know this is an up-tempo love song, not a stuttering novelty. In the bridge - "There is no moon above, and love is far away too" - she lightly swings "above" and "and love," almost gulping each first syllable. You expect her to do the same with "is far," but she smartly...