Jo Stafford

Jul 24 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

SOMETIMES she was known as Darlene Edwards and, when she was parodying the hilly-billy style and drawling speech, she favoured Cinderella G Stump.

But to a generation of Americans she was GI Jo, the glamorous singer, whose voice raised morale during World War II and then the Korean War.

The voice was the key to it. To many critics, Jo Stafford was the most versatile female vocalist in the States, able to sing opera, jazz, blues, country and pop. She was able to escape typecasting, having never been so closely associated with the Services as our Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton.

Music featured strongly in her family life in Coalinga, a “one-horse town” between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The possibilities of oil had persuaded her father, Grover Cleveland Stafford, to move from Gainesboro, Tennessee, but his dreams were not realised and the Great Depression set in.

By then, however, Jo had been introduced to the songs of Tennessee by her mother, Anne, an accomplished player of the five-string banjo.

Jo had hoped that her operatic soprano might put the meat on the table, but, after five years’ training at school, she teamed up with her sisters, Pauline and Christine, and started singing in local shows and the radio.

In 1937, they reached a bigger audience singing in the Astaire/Rogers musical, A Damsel in Distress.

With the marriage of her sisters, Jo joined the seven male members in the Pied Pipers. Their success was drawn to the attention of the mercurial Tommy Dorsey. There were various downs and ups, which led to them backing Frank Sinatra on some recordings, while she began a solo career, though she would often duet with big stars such as Gordon MacRae and Frankie Laine.

Her albums and singles sold in millions – among them Shrimp Boats, You Belong to Me, Jambalaya, Keep It a Secret and Make Love to Me! (all in the early 1950s).

Under the name, Cinderella G Stump, she recorded a hill-billy version of Temptation and then with her husband, Paul Weston, she formed Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, a bad cabaret lounge act. Although retiring in 1966, they recorded a comic version of the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive and other songs in 1977.

Weston, with whom she had two children, died in 1996. Jo was a keen charity worker.

Jo Stafford, singer; born November 12, 1917, died July 16, 2008.