Frankie Laine

Genres:	Country & Bluegrass • Holiday & Seasonal • Musicals & The Arts • Pop / Rock • Vocals • World Music
Descriptive "tags":	country • 50s • oldies • male vocalists • crooners
Decades Active:	1940s • 1950s • 1960s • 1970s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s
Links online:	BBC Music • Wikipedia

Biography

Francesco Paolo LoVecchio, 30 March 1913, Chicago, Illinois, USA, d. 6 February 2007, San Diego, California, USA. Laine had been a chorister at the Immaculate Conception Church in his city’s Sicilian quarter before entering showbusiness proper on leaving school. For nearly a decade he travelled as a singing waiter, dancing instructor (with a victory in a 1932 dance marathon as his principal qualification) and other lowly jobs, but it was as a member of a New Jersey nightclub quartet that he was given his first big break, replacing Perry Como in Freddie Carlone’s touring band in 1937. This was a springboard to a post as house vocalist with a New York radio station until migration to Los Angeles, where he was ‘discovered’ entertaining in a Hollywood spa by Hoagy Carmichael. The songwriter persuaded him to adopt an Anglicized nom de theatre, and funded the 1947 Mercury Records session that resulted in a version of Hadda Brooks’...

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