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Find a "New" Sound. When Miller has found a song for a singer, he calls in the musical arranger, looking for the best way to lift the tune out of the humdrum category. The first objectives: a "new" sound effect—e.g., reverberating echoes or the use of such unlikely instruments as braying French horns or a jangling harpsichord—and an insistent rhythm. To top off the arrangement, Miller asks for a full, rich sound. Sometimes this can be had by a clever distribution of instruments, sometimes it calls for a big orchestra and a massed chorus.
What happens next is standard procedure at all record companies. Advance copies are sent out to as many as 2,000 of the nation's 5,000-odd disk jockeys—the real middlemen of the ballad business. No A & R man can soundly predict how a new disk will take. But company salesmen as a group are good prognosticates, and certain cities, such as Philadelphia and Boston, seem to be particularly seismographic in detecting the rumble of an approaching hit. If the signs are good, the company may press as many as 150,000 copies in the first edition, and then pray for the record to hit. Last year the seven major labels went through all this 2,868 times. Of that number, 81 songs (2.8%) wound up as hits.
Kentucky Melody. Rosemary Clooney comes from historic ballad country, about ten miles upstream from the place where Eliza nipped across the ice ahead of the bloodhounds. She was born on May 23, 1928, the daughter of a housepainter in Maysville, Ky. (pop. 8,600). Her sister Betty came along three years later and, two years after that, a brother, Nicholas. Later her parents separated, and Rosemary, moving from relative to relative and town to town, has never settled down since (though, nowadays, two blocks of a Maysville street is officially known as "Rosemary Clooney Street").
Grandfather Andrew J. Clooney, onetime Democratic mayor of Maysville, set her to singing. One Maysville legend is that the Clooney Sisters, aged 6 and 3, made their debut from his electioneering platform, and wowed the voters with a performance of Home on the Range. In any case, the ham in Rosemary was smoked out early: she was in fourth grade when she played the wicked queen in Snow White and terrified the audience with her intensity.
Growing up, Rosemary and sister Betty were always close and almost always singing. An argument about which one was to take the melody and which the harmony might start in the bathroom before 8 in the morning and continue all the way to school. When Rosemary was 17, they fell into a sister singing act at Cincinnati's WLW and were on their own.
For $20 a week each, the girls were on daily call to sing everything from hillbilly tunes to a soporific midnight show called Moon River. Then one day Bandleader Tony Pastor came through Cincinnati on the lookout for a new singer. The Clooney Sisters, swimming in a local pool when the summons came, rushed out and sang an audition with hair plastered down around their faces, but their voices landed them the job.