Posted 6:14 PM by Gene

On a day when every Godforsaken media outlet thinks it can pulverize its turnips' puny minds into great wealth merely by flashing pictures of the KURT COBAIN OF FILLUM in that sickening makeup, in a mighty wave of self-congratulation such as we have not seen since WOODSTEIN won its P-Ulitzers, all for honoring the immortal notion that WHAT'S GOOD FOR PEOPLE WARNER IS GOOD FOR AMERICA, we learn that someone who was today as well known as we'd guess this IMMORTAL will be sixty years hence has died, and she didn't deserve the obscurity. Jo Stafford would certainly not mean anything to the Babbitts of print, and happily for them she is forgotten despite singing with Tommy Dorsey, and the Pied Pipers, and Young Blue Eyes, and Sy Oliver, and Johnny Mercer, and her husband Paul Weston, a leading arranger and conductor. Perhaps one reason she, like too many vocalists of the forties and fifties, is now where KURT will be sixty years hence is she sang too many novelties and gloppy ballads, and we suspect she'd be the first to admit it; but this does not at all negate (aside from a face that was, shall we say, lovely to look at) a sultry, sexy, caressing contralto and, at least as much to the point, a superb jazz instinct every bit as good as Peggy Lee's. She wasn't the only wolf-whistle inspiring singer of her day -- indeed the deafening wolf-whistles of then are the silence of now -- but she was one of the best, then, and now, and in the whole history of American pop music.