Appreciating all that makes America special

Rosemary Clooney

Rosemary Clooney, www.greatamericanthings.net

Some of Rosemary Clooney's best work are her jazz records made during the last 15 years of her life. Uploaded by arts-wallpapers.com.

Yes, she’s the aunt of George Clooney. But Rosemary Clooney was a huge success in her own right, as both an actress and a singer. Following World War II, she sang with a big band as that era came to a close, and had her first hit single with a song by Ross Bagdasarian (bonus points if you know he’s better known as David Seville, creator of The Chipmunks) called “Come On-a My House.” She hated it.

Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby, www.greatamericanthings.net

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The highlight of her film career was White Christmas, in which she starred with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. (“Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters.”) She and Bing remained good friends – he even wrote the introduction to her autobiography, This for Remembrance: The Autobiography of Rosemary Clooney, an Irish-American Singer.

Clooney had four songs reach number one on the charts during the fifties, and another made number two. Some of her best work, though, came in the yearly albums she recorded on the Concord Jazz label. She produced them from 1976-2001. Singing the songs of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Irving Berlin, she shows herself to have had one of the great voices of recent times.

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