Biography

Jo Stafford's early fame came as a vocalist with the big band of Tommy Dorsey, for which she sang both on her own and with her group, The Pied Pipers. After leaving Dorsey in 1944, Stafford went solo, eventually racking up no less than 93 hits over the next 13 years. Among them: chart-toppers like "Candy" (1945), "My Darling, My Darling" (1948), "You Belong To Me" (1952) and "Make Love To Me" (1955). According to Joel Whitburn's Record Research, Jo Stafford and Dinah Shore were the two top female hit-makers of the pre-rock era. Jo also ranked #6 among all hit makers of the early '50s (1950-4). As her music career dominated her time, Stafford's movie appearances were limited to a handful in '40s films featuring Dorsey and his band.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Theroux - garytheroux@earthlink.net

Born in Coalinga, in California's San Joaquin Valley, Jo Stafford got her start in music when her family moved to the Los Angeles area and her older sisters got jobs at a local radio station. Although Jo had, as a teenager, trained to be a classical opera singer, the Depression quickly dried up what little demand there was for opera singers, and she joined her sisters at the radio station in a singing act called The Stafford Sisters. The girls became quite popular and soon had their own radio show. After her sisters' marriages resulted in the act breaking up, Jo joined up with a recently formed eight-man group called The Pied Pipers, in which she sang lead. Their sophisticated sound and smooth harmonies gained a large following in the area, and they soon found themselves hired to work on movie soundtracks. This brought them to the attention of the arrangers for Tommy Dorsey's orchestra. One of them, Paul Weston (who later married Jo) talked Dorsey into getting the group a spot on a popular radio show called "The Raleigh-Kool Show" out of New York. The group drove cross-country to New York, the spot went well and they were hired to appear on the show for ten weeks. Unfortunately the businessman who was sponsoring the show, who hadn't heard them on the first show, finally did--and hated them. They were promptly fired, and found themselves stranded in New York City with no job and little money. They did manage to find enough work to pay their way back to California, where four of the group's members dropped out. Eventually the remaining members were rehired by Dorsey and joined his orchestra (one of their tasks was to back up a new singer who had just joined the band, named Frank Sinatra). They were a big success and stayed with the band until 1942, when Dorsey--who was known for his bad temper--got into a raging argument with one of the group's members, and the entire group quit. It didn't hurt their career, however, as they quickly found work with local radio stations and were soon signed by Johnny Mercer for his newly formed label, Capitol Records. In 1944 Jo (who had had married Weston by this time) left the group to go solo, and became one of the most popular singers of the era, especially with servicemen, who nicknamed her "G.I. Jo". She left Capitol for Columbia Records in 1950, which eventually got her her own TV show, The Jo Stafford Show (1954), on CBS (the label's parent company). Her career continued unabated, with a string of hit records such as "Shrimp Boats", "Jambalaya" and "Make Love to Me", and in 1961 Capitol Records hired her back with a six-album deal and another TV show (she also had a television show in Great Britain, where she was wildly popular). Her career wasn't all serious, though. One day during a recording session with some time left over, she and her husband, as a gag, recorded some songs as a truly awful third-rate lounge act called Jonathan and Darlene Edwards--"Jonathan" played piano, badly, and "Darlene" sang terrible songs off-key, and neither character had a clue as to how supremely untalented they were. The songs gained a following--with no one knowing that Jonathan and Darlene were actually Jo and her husband--and in 1960 they released a Jonathan and Darlene album called "Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in Paris", which promptly won a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album--ironically, the only Grammy Jo would earn in her long and successful career.

Jo went into semi-retirement in 1966, only making occasional television appearances and a few recordings, and left the business entirely in 1975. Her husband died in 1996, and she lived in California, where she helped her son Tim run the family business. Corinthian Records repackages and releases many of Jo's old songs (she won the masters back from Columbia Records in a breach-of-contract lawsuit she filed against the label).

- IMDb Mini Biography By: frankfob2@yahoo.com