Rosemary Clooney: Highly Regarded Pop-Jazz Singer Dies at 74
Born May 23, 1928, Rosemary Clooney was a popular singer who overcame great personal problems to re-emerge as fine interpreter of the repertoire of writers like Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, George and Ira Gershwin, Johnny Burke, Jimmy Van Heusen, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Although she always refused to be categorised as a jazz singer, much of her later work involved collaborations with jazz musicians, including a number of records on the Concord Jazz label.
Writing in the New York Times, Richard Severo commented that “Ms. Clooney did not dig as deeply into the emotional content of a song as Frank Sinatra did; she never tried to emulate the sound and delivery of an instrument as Mel Torm seemed to do so easily; she did not burst into the scat choruses favored by Ella Fitzgerald. But she sang with so much assuredness, simplicity and honesty that these elements became her trademark and endeared her to audiences and critics alike."
