Subject: RE: Worst singing accent.
From:
keberoxu
Date: 05 Jul 18 - 09:23 AM
And then, there's Dean Martin.
A caveat: Dean Martin's singing accent is far from the worst.
He knew what he was about. He chose an admirable artist on whom
to model his own singing sound, and what you hear
when Dean Martin sings is the result of consistent practice and hard work
at sounding natural and at ease with an accent different than your own.
Again, Martin chose well. He modelled his sound on Donald Mills,
the Mills Brothers ensemble member who most often
takes the solo parts in the group's harmonizing.
And Donald Mills had a strong, wholesome, stabilizing quality
to his vocal technique and to his interpretations,
not a singing personality of attention-grabbing extremes.
You have to have an ear for subtle differences in quality
to hear the distinction
between Donald Mills,
whom I believe sang the way he spoke and spoke the way he sang,
and Dean Martin,
who sang with one accent and spoke with another.
Funny business, popular USA music.
The Mills Brothers existed long before the era of
I'm Black and I'm Proud, and they were not confrontational men.
There were parts of the United States, on performance tours,
which they visited just the once, and to which they never returned,
because, as one of them said in an interview,
"we didn't like unpleasantness."
And yet it's my opinion -- I might be mistaken here --
that Mills Brothers recordings were popular over the whole of the USA,
not just where they felt at ease performing and staying in hotels.
They didn't cause a sensation, but they were deeply loved.
And they were enjoyed even by listeners who had no clue.
Meanwhile, Dean Martin took his career to places that
few popular singers can dream of;
he didn't win a Oscar for film acting as Frank Sinatra did,
but he was in films for all that (Westerns),
and he had his own prime-time variety television show.
Yes, he is up there with Doris Day,
and ye gods! What a shock it was for me to discover
the recordings that broke her into the music business.
I grew accustomed, in my growing-up years,
to Doris Day's recordings after she had Arrived, career-wise.
She went back and re-recorded songs like "A Sentimental Journey"
and they sounded totally white-bread-and-blue-eyes, as it were.
But it was when I was considerably older
that I heard her earlier recording of "Sentimental Journey,"
a performance that is the result of
what must have been hours upon hours of listening to
what were then called "race records,"
imitating and practicing both an accent and a sense of syncopated rhythm
that could be heard nowhere else in music at the time.
The young Doris Day, on those early recordings,
sounds altogether like something that she never really was.
She sounds as though she could have been one of
the singers recruited by Duke Ellington for his orchestra.
|
sj
