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Times have changed for the brick building at 207 East 30th Street. Manhattan, that was once the Adams Memorial Presbyterian Church. The stained-glass windows are bricked up, the pews are gone, and in place of the organ there is a glass-fronted control room which bristles with switches, plugs and dials. Instead of such rousing hymns as Onward! Christian Soldiers and Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, the old building resounded this week to the throb of a popular-music combo. And near the spot where a vested minister once stood at sermon time, a perky blonde in her stocking feet poised herself before a microphone and sang a little number about a fellow who wouldn't take his hand off her knee.
The words & music might have been a mild shock to turn-of-the-century parishioners, but they were everyday business—and mighty good business—to Columbia Records, which leased old Adams Presbyterian five years ago for a recording studio. And for Rosemary Clooney, the long-legged blonde at the microphone, it was nothing more or less than her millions of fans have come to expect. Clooney and Columbia are partners in a booming U.S. business which can best be described as the manufacture and sale of the American ballad.*
With six other big record labels last year (Capitol, Coral, Decca, Mercury MGM, RCA Victor), Columbia shared in the pressing of something like $100 million worth of popular music. The product, boosted around the world by disk jockeys, record-players. TV, movies and old-fashioned stem-winding phonographs, is as ubiquitous as the American candy bar, the milkshake and the neon-lighted jukebox. And to ballad buyers, the voice of Rosemary Clooney, 24, has become as familiar as the voice of F.D.R. was to their parents.
Putting It Across. By Metropolitan Opera standards, Songstress Clooney is as innocent of musical training as a rose-breasted grosbeak. She never bothered to learn to read notes ("I can tell whether the tune goes up or down, but I can't tell how far"). She disdains such long-hair affectations as warming up her voice ("What have I got to warm up?"). But in common with the new postwar generation of ballad vendors, including such contemporaries as Patti Page (Mercury), Peggy Lee (Decca), Joni James (M-G-M), Jo Stafford and Doris Day (both Columbia), Rosemary knows how to put a song across.
As she prances up to the mike, Rosemary drops her cough drop into her palm, makes a moue at the control room and opens her mouth. If the tune has a bounce, her slim Irish face lights up and her trim, spring-legged figure jigs happily; her smile can be heard as well as seen. If the words are sad, her face takes on a little-girl-lost look. The moment her stint at the mike is through, she pops her candy back in her mouth, swigs at a bottle of Coke.