"I get an awful lot of mail from women like me," says Torch Singer Roberta Sherwood. "That is, from the women with a middle-aged spread. A lot of them had ambitions that were never realized, and I guess I look as if I am realizin' them." Thus, after bowing demurely to an ovation at Manhattan's Copacabana, Singer Sherwood explained the infectious appeal that in the last year has turned her, at 43, into the nation's biggest new nightclub hit.
Roberta has more than the un-glamour of middle age. to recommend her—an open, frankly sentimental, strongly appealing style. She makes her entrance chanting...