Forgotten crooner Jack Smith was Jacob Schmidt in The Bronx, New York City. He was known as Whispering Jack Smith and was a popular baritone singer in the 1920s and 1930s Smith began his professional career in 1915, when he sang with a quartet at a theater in the Bronx. After service in World War I, he got a job in 1918 as a song plugger for the Irving Berlin Music Publishing Company. He was a pianist at a radio station when he got his singing break substituting for a singer who failed to show up. Smith was exclusively on the radio, but beginning in 1925, he began making records. He also started performing on-stage on the vaudeville circuit. In 1927, Smith toured England, performing with the Blue Skies Theater Company singing tunes such as Manhattan by Rodgers and Hart and songs by Gershwin, when he was suddenly replaced by a new all-girl singing trio, the Hamilton Sisters & Fordyce. Smith returned to New York and eventually went to work for NBC Radio. He had a very distinctive style which was a combination of singing and talking in a very intimate way using the microphone very effectively as opposed to belting the song out. His whispering style of singing was a result of a World War I injury from poison gas that kept him from singing at full volume. He made the whispering style popular, and there were a number of imitators. Smith took to the relatively newly invented microphone, and it was singers like Whispering Jack Smith and the early crooners who developed the use of this modern technology.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 20:46:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015