(2 of 7)
Turks in the Well. The Clooney voice is known to the trade as both "barrelhouse" and blue, i.e., robust and fresh, with an undercurrent of seductiveness. It can spin out a slow tune with almost cello-like evenness, or take on a raucous bite in a fast rhythm. In a melancholy mood, it has a cinnamon flavor that tends to remind fans of happier days gone by—or soon to come. Moreover, thanks to the malocclusion of the Clooney jaw, her voice carries just a hint of a lisp. A word like "kiss" comes out a bit like "kish," and "caress" like "caresh." Like Bing Crosby, who attributed some of the distinctiveness of his early bu-bu-bu-boos to a node on his vocal cords, Clooney gets a sound that no competitor quite duplicates. In the ballad business, where distinctiveness is worth more than a clear high C, her voice is instantly recognizable.
Much of the ballad public, with a passion for oversimplification, prefers to believe that Rosemary Clooney was created overnight by one record, an Armenian-American calypso called Come On-a My House ("I'm gonna give-a you everything . . ."). Come On-a My House did make the public Clooney-conscious. Whipped up by Author William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian on a cross-country automobile junket more than ten years before—and purposely patterned after ancient Armenian folk songs—Come On-a went nowhere until Clooney's recording. Then it leaped from the ranks of the mere hits (any disk that sells 200,000 copies) into the enchanted circle of million-copy smashes. The song itself has keen likened by at least one fan magazine writer to the sounds a drunken Turk might make shouting down a well. The fact is that Clooney did as much for the song as the song did for her.
Rosemary Clooney does not have a "stage" voice. Like Dinah Shore and half a dozen other microphone buggers in this era of the electronic vocal, Rosemary has been turned down for Broadway shows. But by all the signs, her steady success is assured so long as the ballad business lives, as it lives today, by making records.
Gone Are the Days. During the '20s, '30s and part of the '40s, music publishers got along well enough without much help from the record industry. In the early days, such a hit as Glow Worm might sell two or three million copies of sheet music for them. After it was launched in vaudeville or a Broadway show, its principal salesman was a fast-talking song plugger whose job it was to visit bandleaders and coax or coerce a performance out of them. If he could get a song on Kate Smith's radio program he had done a good week's work. His pitch might run from "Please play this song—if only to ease the pain of my ulcers" to "What prizefight or show would you like to see?" Although such a plugger was usually no musician, he was blood brother to the tired-looking gent behind music-store counters, pumping out sheet music on the piano.