Jeri Sullivan Transcriptions Plus More Singles

The talented yet virtually unknown singer Jeri Sullivan returns with some of the best material I've posted as yet - six songs from an Armed Forces Radio Service transcription, along with six additional songs from commercial singles.

Sullivan was on radio throughout the 1940s, worked as a Hollywood dubbing artist, and made singles for several labels. Then in 1953, she turned up as "Jenny Barrett" and made recordings for two different companies.

She's appeared on this blog several times. Post number one detailed her early career and included a single on Signature records, a V-Disc of her "Rum and Coca-Cola" recording and two radio transcriptions. In post two, we looked at her work on the movie A Song Is Born and some of her releases under the name Jenny Barrett in the 1950s.

Later, Bryan Cooper contributed another Signature single, which I published on Buster's Swinging Singles, and then a set of Standard Transcriptions for this blog. Simon Buckmaster added six one-of-a-kind acetate recordings, a single on the Metro Hollywood label and one more Signature single.

Here are the details on today's selections.

AFRS Showtime Songs

Sullivan appeared on an AFRS transcription in a series called Showtime. The programs in that series either recreated musicals or focused on the songs from musicals. The latter was the case in this program, which I believe came from about April 1946, based on the numbering and dating of other shows in the series.

Jeri sang six songs on the show - all excellent and well recorded. She started off with two Rodgers and Hart tunes - "This Can't Be Love" from The Boys from Syracuse and "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" from Too Many Girls, both beautifully done and sympathetically conducted by Michel Perriere.

The program took a break from show tunes to showcase what it called "Jeri's own song" - "Rum and Coca-Cola." A nice sentiment, even if Sullivan didn't actually write it. (See discussion here.) That said, her interpretation is among the best I have heard.

Finally, Jeri takes up three torch songs from circa 1930, and shows she had quite an affinity for the genre. The first is "The Thrill Is Gone," which originated in George White's Scandals of 1931, where it was introduced by Rudy Vallee. (Never would have guessed that.) The writers were Ray Henderson and Lew Brown.

Next she programmed two songs closely associated with Libby Holman, both from The Little Show of 1929. "Moanin' Low" was written by Ralph Rainger, with lyrics by Howard Dietz. "Can't We Be Friends?" has lyrics by Paul James and music by Kay Swift. I've not heard either done better, although it sounds like Perriere wanted a faster tempo than Sullivan.

A Second Metro Hollywood Single

The newly discovered singles start with a release by the small Metro Hollywood label circa 1948. The two songs were probably recorded by the ARA label, which was active from 1944 to 1946, and acquired by Metro Hollywood. The latter label seems to have gone under in 1948 after having been sued by M-G-M records for infringement.

As I previously speculated about another Metro Hollywood release, these probably were made in 1946. One side is "I'll See You in C-U-B-A," a 1920 Irving Berlin song revived for the 1946 Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire musical Blue Skies. (The Metro Hollywood label calls the song "CUBA" and dubs the singer "Jerri Sullivan," one of several variant spellings for her name.)

The flip side was another torch song - "Take Me in Your Arms," written by Fred Markush and Fritz Rotter. Mitchell Parish gave it English lyrics and it became a US hit in 1932 for Ruth Etting.

Both songs are very nicely done, with an unidentified orchestra.

Vogue, Coral and 'Jenny Barrett'

If You Please - Drusilla Davis, Sullivan, Frank Fay, Barbara Torrence

In 1950, Jeri appeared in Frank Fay's revue, If You Please, in San Francisco. As late as 1952, the singer was making personal appearances as "Jeri Sullivan." Then in 1953 she became Jenny Barrett, and again made a few records.

Billboard, June 13, 1953

The first, "He Loves Me," was on the small Vogue label. The label gave away the fact that Barrett was Sullivan by advertising that she wrote the song and attributing it on the label to Sullivan (and Bedell). 

This transfer of "He Loves Me" in this collection is better than the one I included in an earlier post. As I wrote then, "It's not a successful record, but is fascinating even so. The singer carries on an internal monologue throughout the song, a year before Richard Adler and Jerry Ross were to employ a similar device for 'Hey There' in The Pajama Game. But in 'He Loves Me,' it turns into an overdone and distracting gimmick."

This post also includes the flip side, "Do Me a Favor," a double-tracked waltz that's an incursion into Patti Page territory. It's OK, and well produced. Both songs have lush backing by trumpeter-arranger Hall Daniels.

At the same time as her Vogue release, Barrett/Sullivan was in the studio for the much bigger Coral label. Her initial effort was a breathy take on the Ray Noble standard "The Touch of Your Lips." Billboard observed, "The thrush bows on the label with a sexy, suggestive rendition of the evergreen, selling the item via a most intimate and cozy rendition which should get it banned from a few stations with no trouble at all."

The other side of the Coral record was "Hurry, Hurry Home," which betrays more than a little familiarity with Chopin's Minute Waltz. It was attributed nonetheless to Jeri Sullivan and Cindy Barrett (not sure about the Cindy-Jenny relationship, if any). There is not as much heavy breathing on this side. Tony Iavello was the bandleader.

Since my first "Jenny Barrett" post, I've come across Sullivan's own explanation of the name change, via an article in the June 3, 1953 Down Beat. "Why did I become Jenny Barrett? The answer is just too simple: I am Jenny Barrett. It is my legal name. Jenny was the name my parents picked for me. Barrett was the name of my husband, who died about a year ago... Jenny Barrett is not only my real name but part of my life, the part that is nearest and most important to me right now."

Jeri Sullivan on radio in the 1940s

I have to say her explanation confuses me, because I had previously uncovered information that suggested she was born as Leona Schlosser. And the month after this Down Beat issue came out, the magazine announced that she was "becoming Mrs. Bob (Ten Top Tunes show on KLAC) McLaughlin."

The self-penned Down Beat story was likely placed by a Vogue records publicist to draw attention to her as Jeri Sullivan, allowing her to boast that "as soon as word got out that Vogue's 'new singer' was 'Jeri Sullivan' I have been contacted by not only the news services but by many nationally known columnists who 'wanted to get the real story.' Why was I scrapping Jeri Sullivan and all the publicity value that went with that name?" Well, precisely because publicizing the change helped her to regain the limelight she had lost.

Her revived recording career did not last long. Vogue went under and Coral made only one more single with her, one of the few items that hasn't turned up for posting here. 

Jeri Sullivan, Part 2: 'A Song Is Born' and the 1950s

In Part 1 of this two-part series, I looked into the early life and career of Jeri Sullivan, including her radio program, the controversy about "Rum and Coca-Cola" and her Signature records releases.

Part 2 examines her brief career as a movie dubber, then the rest of her career as I've been able to discover, including one of the records she made under the name Jenny Barrett.

First, let's go into some depth about her first dubbing assignment, the 1948 film A Song Is Born, because it is musically interesting even aside from her participation.

'A Song Is Born'

Sullivan had had a screen test, but never had appeared in films except for a 1942 short titled "You'll Have to Swing It," I assume for the song sometimes called "Mr. Paganini," a hit for Ella Fitzgerald in 1936. I haven't been able to locate a copy of this short.

Late in 1947, Sullivan became involved in a feature film for the first time - but not on the screen. She was engaged to dub the singing voice of Virginia Mayo, one of the leads in the Goldwyn musical, A Song Is Born.

A Song Is Born is a remake of the better-regarded Ball of Fire from 1941. Instead of Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck as leads, you get Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo. In the excerpts I viewed on YouTube (links below), Mayo is better than I remembered, but Kaye is at his most fidgety. The plot is insanely dumb, so I'll not try to explain it. Suffice to say that Benny Goodman, with plastered-down hair and a moustache, is cast as classical clarinetist Professor Magenbruch, who learns to loosen up from such swing savants as Louis Armstrong and Charlie Barnet.

I don't know if the movie's plot does more violence to classical music or pop, but it does manage to introduce several interesting musical interludes that involve Benny, Louis, Lionel Hampton, Mel Powell, Barnet and Page Cavanaugh - and Jeri Sullivan's singing voice.

In 1948, Capitol Records issued a three-record 78 set called Giants of Jazz containing songs from the film (included in the download). The title song ("A Song Is Born") is an edited version of what appears on the soundtrack, but the others were made in the Capitol studio a few months before the film was released in late 1948.

"A Song Is Born," written by Don Raye and Gene de Paul, is a good tune, although clearly inspired by "The Birth of the Blues," a 1926 DeSilva-Brown-Henderson song that was revived for the Crosby film of the same name in 1941.

You see Virginia Mayo; you hear Jeri Sullivan

The album version of "A Song Is Born" is double-sided, but even so was significantly shortened from what appears in the film. On screen, Kaye introduces the Golden Gate Quartet as presenting a "pure Negro spiritual" - which turns out to be a setting of the principal theme of the Largo from Dvořák's Ninth Symphony, which is almost certainly not based on a spiritual (although it was later reworked into the quasi-spiritual "Goin' Home" by one of the composer's pupils). This passage is eliminated from the two-sided 78 version, so when Tommy Dorsey reprises the "Goin' Home" music as his solo, it comes out of nowhere. The film sequence also features drummer Louie Bellson at his most Krupa-esque. And Jeri Sullivan makes her first vocal appearance; she's perfect as Mayo's double.

Charlie Barnet, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman
and Louis Armstrong

Harry Babasin, Mel Powell, Virginia Mayo and Lionel Hampton
stare in disbelief at Benny's moustache

The next song in the album is a Benny Goodman take on "Stealin' Apples," a song he first released in 1940. The film version of "Stealin' Apples" is in the swing idiom, using Lionel Hampton and Mel Powell as soloists in addition to Benny. By the time Capitol got around to making its recording a year later, Goodman had tentatively embraced the newest jazz fashion, and the version in the album has a bop arrangement, with soloists Wardell Gray and Fats Navarro (identified on the label as Theodore Navarro). Benny fits right in, although his licks are not different from what he might have played in a swing arrangement. This appears to be the only session where Benny employed the very bop-oriented Navarro. Gray was with Benny from May 1948 off and on until late 1949 or 1950.

"Muskrat Ramble" (not on YouTube) is a highly effective Dixieland workout, led by pianist Mel Powell. As early as 1939, Powell was working with Bobby Hackett, George Brunies, and Zutty Singleton, as well as writing arrangements for Earl Hines. He joined Goodman in 1941, then was assigned to Glenn Miller's Army Air Force Band from 1943 to 1945. From 1948 to 1952 he studied at Yale University with classical composer Paul Hindemith, and subsequently became a well-known educator and composer himself, winning a Pulitzer Prize while continuing to play and occasionally record jazz. Powell's technique is rooted in the 1920s, but he has his own take on the older style. "Muskrat Ramble" includes lively contributions from the gusty Clyde Hurley and Lou McGarity.

Charlie Barnet appears with a tune called "Redskin Rhumba" (not on YouTube), which he had been using as his band's theme song. It is a Latin version of Ray Noble's "Cherokee," a hit for Barnet in 1939. Here the song is ascribed to Dale Bennett, which I believe is a Barnet pseudonym. Barnet's solo is characteristically noisy.

Now back to Jeri Sullivan. The big number for her (and Mayo) is a fun Don Raye-Gene de Paul song written for the film called "Daddy-O." Sullivan is backed by Page Cavanaugh and his trio in the film and on record, with Al Viola on guitar and Lloyd Pratt on bass. Cavanaugh recorded a different version for Victor backing vocalist Lillian Lane, which can be found on YouTube.

"Daddy-O" bears some resemblance to "Shoo Shoo Baby," a Phil Moore song that was a hit for the Andrews Sisters in 1943. Sullivan's manner is a bit reminiscent of Ella Mae Morse's vocal on her single of "Shoo Shoo Baby," although Jeri's approach is not as down-home as Ella Mae.

The download of the album has been considerably remastered from the version on Internet Archive. I do own the Sullivan record of "Daddy-O" (which was backed by the Barnet side), but was too indolent to transfer it when I had another rip in hand.

The 1950s and 'Jenny Barrett'

Sullivan did so well as a vocal double that you would think more opportunities would have come her way. But only one did - in 1950, she was engaged for the film Love That Brute, dubbing Jean Peters in "You Took Advantage of Me" - and doing it exceptionally well.

Meanwhile, her nightclub career was at a standstill. A Billboard article in 1950 noted that she had started making personal appearances again "after several years of inactivity." In 1952, she could be seen at the Gatineau Country Club in Ottawa (right).

As far as I can tell, her Capitol and Signature releases of 1948 had been her last. Then, in 1953, she made the curious decision to change her professional name to Jenny Barrett - making a fresh start, I suppose.

The newly named singer did snag a record contract with a fledgling firm - Vogue Records (not the picture-disc company nor the French jazz label). Vogue tried to make a splash but didn't last long. Its other artists included Geno Rockford and Fred Darian, so not a well-known roster.

Jeri/Jenny's contribution to the Vogue catalogue - as far as I can determine, her only issue - was a coupling of "He Loves Me" and "Do Me a Favor." I was able to locate a transfer of "He Loves Me" and have remastered it for the download. It's not a successful record, but is fascinating even so. The singer carries on an internal monologue with herself throughout the song, a year before Richard Adler and Jerry Ross were to employ a similar device for "Hey There" in The Pajama Game. But in "He Loves Me," it turns into an overdone and distracting gimmick.

"He Loves Me" was a Sullivan composition, one of several that I've discovered. She also worked with Bob Carroll (possibly the singer) on some songs, and other writers. Guy Lombardo recorded her "('Round the) Christmas Tree at Home" in 1951; it appears on his Jingle Bells LP.

Vogue apparently did not have enough money to stay in business, but it did give Jenny Barrett a fair amount of promotion. She appeared on the cover of the industry publication The Cash Box in July 1953, and was promoting Soundcraft recording tapes at about the same time, looking notably ill-at-ease in both situations. Her photo was also on the "He Loves Me" sheet music.

Post-Vogue, Jenny moved on to the Coral label for four sides that I don't have and that don't seem to be online.

I hate to end with an anti-climax, but I don't have any more information about Jenny Barrett. The only later Jeri/Jerri Sullivan/Sullavan entry that I could locate was in a publisher's Billboard ad from 1960, which has a Jerri Sullivan recording Steve Allen's "This Could Be the Start of Something" for Mark 56 records (right). Is she our Jeri Sullivan? It's hard to say.

Why couldn't Sullivan build on her early success? We can only speculate. One theme, though, is that she seems more relaxed when she is not "out front" - her movie dubbings are much more persuasive than her Soundies, for example. A theme that runs through the early reviews of her nightclub act is that she was not engaged with the audience - although if later reviews are to be believed, that did improve.

The most likely explanation, though, is simply chance. There isn't much that separates a talented singer whose career sputters from a star who achieves lasting fame.

I enjoyed doing this deep dive into the career of a relatively unknown singer. I want to thank two of my friends, musicologist Nick Morgan and author Andy Propst, for inspiring me and suggesting research tools. You were right, Nick - newspapers.com is addictive.

Coda to my last post: our great friend David Federman has concocted a "Rum and Coca-Cola" collection for all of us, with the toast, "Let's all drink to imperialism!" He includes the versions by Lord Invader and Wilmoth Houdini (and their follow-up records), plus the likes of Abe Lyman and Louis Prima, among others. See the comments to the last post for a very limited-time (five days) link.