BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY
credit: Getty Images
This week’s reason to smile is a celebration of Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero. You might know her better as Connie Francis. Saturday would have been her 88th birthday.
Francis was the Taylor Swift of her day. She was the most popular female vocalist from 1958 to 1964. Her song “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” reached No. 1 on the fledgling pop charts in 1960, making her the first woman to hit the top spot. She was the first woman to sell 100 million albums, cementing her place as one of the best-selling artists of all time.
The singer and actress, born in Newark, New Jersey in 1937, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, got her start at local talent shows. Her first mentor, Arthur Godfrey of Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, gave her three pieces of transformative advice: focus on her voice, lose the accordion, which the teenager was more than happy to do, and change her name.
Though Francis’s career was primarily a solo one, this duet with Bobby Darin is so infectiously upbeat, that it is hard not to smile while watching the two sing “You Make Me Feel So Young.” The song, part of the Great American Songbook, was made popular by another New Jersey native born on December 12, Frank Sinatra.
Francis’s unparalleled popularity in the early 1960s can be attributed to several things. Her timing was excellent — she came up just before the British Invasion took the American music scene by storm. She was immensely talented and had not only an ear for music but for languages — she picked up Yiddish as a teenager simply by living in a mixed Italian-Jewish neighborhood.
Her innate ability within languages allowed her to record songs in English, Italian, French, German, Greek, Yiddish, even Japanese. This broadened her appeal among American immigrant communities and also internationally. Francis even played at a Royal Command Performance for Queen Elizabeth II in Scotland in 1963.
NYA Thanks Dan Rather and Team Steady!