Word: tunefully
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...prances up to the mike, Rosemary drops her cough drop into her palm, makes a moue at the control room and opens her mouth. If the tune has a bounce, her slim Irish face lights up and her trim, spring-legged figure jigs happily; her smile can be heard as well as seen. If the words are sad, her face takes on a little-girl-lost look. The moment her stint at the mike is through, she pops her candy back in her mouth, swigs at a bottle of Coke...
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...
...William (Mitch) Miller (TIME Aug. 20, 1951), a long-hair (Eastman School) who for the last two years has guided his label to the No. 1 position among pop-record producers. Once a week he throws open the doors of his audition room in the hope of hearing a tune that is "right" for one of his stable of singers-Johnnie Ray (Cry), Jimmy Boyd (I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus), Frankie Lame (High Noon). Jo Stafford (Jambalaya), or Clooney. In four or five hours he receives a parade of professional managers, may sample 50 or more new songs while...
Find a "New" Sound. When Miller has found a song for a singer, he calls in the musical arranger, looking for the best way to lift the tune out of the humdrum category. The first objectives: a "new" sound effect-e.g., reverberating echoes or the use of such unlikely instruments as braying French horns or a jangling harpsichord-and an insistent rhythm. To top off the arrangement, Miller asks for a full, rich sound. Sometimes this can be had by a clever distribution of instruments, sometimes it calls for a big orchestra and a massed chorus...