Word: singers
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...jealous of her sister right from the start," Mrs. Thornburg told TIME in 1950. "She was always in my lap, always after affection. She would stand on her head, do cartwheels, yell or do anything to attract attention away from her quieter sister." Marion would become a band singer of moderate repute under the name Marion Hutton. She never achieved her sister's volcanic success. Yet it was Betty whose career was one long, desperate plea for the love she felt she never got at home...
Nobody came on to the movie camera - wrapped it in a bear hug and wrestled it to submission - like Betty Hutton. They called this 40s singer-actress "the Blitzkrieg blond" for an energy that would make Rachael Ray seem logy by comparison. Film critic James Agee, and other scribes at TIME, described her variously as "rubber-jointed," "brass-lunged," "super-dynamic," "bouncing, bawling," "raucous, rampageous." To Bob Hope she was "a vitamin pill with legs." She seemed to have swallowed a truckload full of them before every performance; she was indomitable, unstoppable, the Fuller Brush flack with a quick smile...
...German-Jewish family that prized classical music; his father was a piano teacher, his brother Arthur a keyboard prodigy and later a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Music. To the Loessers, popular music was infra dig, but Frank loved it. Like the cantor's son in The Jazz Singer, or pert Owl Jolson in the Tex Avery cartoon I Love to Sing-a, he had to battle his family's resistance to mainstream pop. Indeed, Loesser's nearly operatic score for The Most Happy Fella might have been his way of saying, Papa, can you hear it? Arthur...
...hard to find a Hutton equivalent among her contemporaries, let alone now. Danny Kaye poured comic pizzazz into his tongue-twisting tunes, but had a hard time with ballads. Martha Raye did a lot of broad comedy, but without Betty's fresh-scrubbed glamour. Doris Day was another band-singer blond gone Hollywood, but with a more conventional softness. Only Betty had the whole package. She was vivacious, pretty, a Nobel-dynamite-winning thrush, an appealing actress who excelled in comedy and, if a director could just tamp down her pile-driving instincts, drama. TIME, searching for the portmanteau...
...ASPIRING CLASSICAL singer Walter Turnbull founded an after-school program for local kids--and soon forgot his operatic ambitions. Launched in a church basement, the Boys Choir of Harlem has performed for Popes and Presidents and on a slew of film sound tracks. It even spawned a music academy. Though the school closed and Turnbull drew criticism following a student's 2001 allegation of sexual abuse by a teacher, the choir continues to educate kids ages 9 to 19. "It's nothing grandiose or big," Turnbull said. "We just try to get kids to understand the importance of simple things...