Dinah Shore

Dinah Shore

• Ceremony was on February 8, 1960

Television Star for Dinah Shore

Location: 6916 Hollywood Boulevard
https://www.google.com/maps/place/6916+Hollywood+Boulevard

Dinah Shore

• Ceremony was on February 8, 1960

Radio Star for Dinah Shore

Location: 1751 Vine Street
https://www.google.com/maps/place/1751+Vine+Street

Dinah Shore

• Ceremony was on February 8, 1960

Recording Star for Dinah Shore

Location: 6901 Hollywood Boulevard
https://www.google.com/maps/place/6901+Hollywood+Boulevard

Dinah Sings Previn Plays

Singer, actress, and television personality, Dinah Shore was one of America's most popular entertainers long after her mid-40s commercial peak. She was also the first major vocalist to break away from the big-band format and begin a solo-billed career. Born Frances Rose Shore in rural Tennessee on February 29, 1916 (she died of cancer on February 24, 1994), Dinah rose to prominence as a recording artist during the Big Band era. After failing singing auditions for the bands of Benny Goodman, and both Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, she struck out on her own, becoming the first singer of her era to achieve huge solo success. She had a string of 80 charted popular hits, spanning 1940-1957, and after appearing in a handful of feature films, she went on to a four-decade career in American television. She starred in her own music and variety shows from 1951 through 1963 and hosted two talk shows in the 1970s. During the '40s, she recorded several of the decade's biggest singles - "Buttons and Bows," "The Gypsy," and "I'll Walk Alone" - all of which spent more than a month at number one on the Hit Parade. Though her records didn't chart as high during the "50s, Dinah enjoyed even more exposure with her top-rated variety show, The Dinah Shore Chevy Show. For many, Shore's opening and closing every show with "See the USA in your Chevrolet, America's the greatest land of all" practically defined the '50s.

This album is definitely a lost jazz gem. Recorded in 1959, it is, as a concept album, comparable to both Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra's best works. Dinah's wonderfully unforced sweet smouldering voice and interpretation of some of the best of the American songbook along with Andre Previn's exquisite piano, Red Mitchell on bass, and Frank Capp on drums, are an absolute joy. This small group set is also a one-of-a-kind in Shore's discography, as she usually recorded with the backing of big bands.

Side A

• The Man I Love
• April in Paris
• That Old Feeling
• I've Got You Under My Skin
• Then I'll Be Tired of You
• Sleepy Time Gal
• It's All Right with Me

• My Melancholy Baby
• My Funny Valentine
• It Had to Be You
• I'll Be Seeing You
• If I Had You
• Bye Bye Blues

Holding Hands At Midnight

Dinah Shore graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in sociology, a branch of science she has practiced ever since. Hers is a very personal voice, one that on records or on radio or on television seems to be directed at you exclusively.

It's a great trick if you can do it and she has been doing it these many years now with increasing, rather than diminishing skill. She's one of the people whose public and private personalities are identical. Practically everything you see on her television show is exactly herself. Her producer has variously had her singing in Paris, London, Scotland, Ireland, Pompeii, Holland, Germany, South America, Mexico and North Africa-but somehow, wherever it is, it comes out slightly scented with magnolia. It's always Dinah, a voice you could recognize instantly in Times Square if she screamed for help.

It's a velvet-covered voice and she sings as if she believed the words. And while she's singing them, she does. "Feel every song you sing," she says, and I think that's why you feel them too. She is an all-around Joe DiMaggio of singers. She can tackle any sort of song, though I suppose ballads are her special dish of tea.

But like any good performer she insists on a good script and, in this album, she has it. These are both old and fairly new songs by some of America's greatest composers Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Walter Donaldson, George Gershwin and Vernon Duke, to name only some of them. You'll find a little of everything here from the lilt of Nice Work if You Can Get It, one of the last songs Gershwin ever wrote, to the haunting blues note of Mr. Arlen's Come Rain or Come Shine, to the tricky rhythms and lovely lyrics of Mr. Porter's Easy to Love.

It's quite a challenge, this assortment of rhythms and styles, but Miss Dinah is more than a match for it.
John Crosby

Side 1

• Nice Work If You Can Get It
• Easy to Love
• Come Rain Or Come Shine
• Once in a While
• It Had to Be You
• You're Driving Me Crazy!

• That Great Come-And-Get-It Day
• Moanin' in The Mornin'
• Under a Blanket of Blue
• Taking a Chance on Love
• I Concentrate on You
• Yesterdays

Vivacious

Ever since Dinah Shore was a cheerleader at Hume Fogg High School in Nashville, Tennessee, there has never been any question that this was a really vivacious girl. Back in those days, vivacity was the most outstanding characteristic of Frances Rose Shore. Since then, of course, she has expanded her repertoire of talents enormously as singer, actress, comedienne, hostess, personality and (according to a 1959 Gallup Poll) one of the ten most admired women in the world.

But her development of all these talents has been dependent to a great extent on the vivaciousness with which she started out. This vivaciousness has given her that extra sparkle, the urge toward perfection which has made her the most consistent award winner on television in the past few years. A run-down of Dinah's TV awards provides an impressive summing-up of the way she has met the challenge of broadening her scope as a television performer.

In 1955, when the Emmy award for the best female singer on TV was presented for the first time, it went to Dinah. She took it again in 1956. The next year, 1957, she came in first in a more inclusive category as the top female "personality" of the year. The category was expanded still further in 1958 to cover the "best continuing performance (female), in a series, by a comedienne, singer, host, dancer, M.C., announcer, narrator, panelist or any other person who essentially plays herself." Even with all this addenda, Dinah won again. And she carried it off once more in 1959.

It is now almost twenty years since Dinah broke into bigtime radio when station WNEW in New York teamed her with another new and promising singer named Frank Sinatra. The clue to her continued success can be found in the last part of the requirements set forth in this Emmy category - "any ... person who essentially plays herself."

Dinah, as herself, has charmed audiences with her forthright warmth in one entertainment medium after another on records, beginning with an appearance as the vocalist on a Xavier Cugat recording for RCA Victor; on radio on the famous "Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street" series and the Eddie Cantor show; in the movies in "Up in Arms," "Follow the Boys," "Till the Clouds Roll By" and others; in a select list of plush supper clubs; and, since 1951, on television.

As the television hostess who has the mostest Emmy awards, Dinah has also stepped out recently as the wearer of a fabulous wardrobe. The six different outfits she wears each Sunday evening on her program have become as important to viewers as her singing and her guests and have won her a citation from Harper's Bazaar for her impact on the fashion industry. They have also forced her to develop still another talent-to become a quick-change artist. As a rule, she has twenty seconds to get out of one gown and into the next one. "If I have one minute to make a change," she once said, "I can relax."

The projection of Dinah's warm personality comes through just as richly on records as it does on television. This is not simply because of the unique and enticing vocal qualities which originally shot her to quick fame but also because of her infallible sense in picking her songs. This collection shows the Shore shrewdness at work. These are songs which not only rest fondly in the memory but they are songs which are ideally suited to Dinah's silken delivery or, as the case may be, her vivacious buoyancy.

She has a keen and welcoming ear for the interesting composers of all periods in the world of popular music. Here she has drawn on an intriguing variety of styles ranging from the richly blues-touched ideas of Duke Ellington (I Got It Bad) to the unquenchably torchy (Just Friends) right on through to a sturdy sample of her own bubbling zest for life, I'm Sitting on Top of the World.

Whatever the song, it's obvious that Dinah Shore has lost none of the vivaciousness she had when she was urging on the teams as a cheerleader at Hume Fogg High. But there's one difference. Today all those cheers are for her.
Notes by Ed Duncan

Side 1

• Sentimental Journey
• I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good
• I'm Sitting on Top of The World
• Under a Blanket of Blue
• I'll Come Back (If You'll Come Back)

• What Can I Say After I Say I'm Sorry
• I'll Never Say Never Again Again
• Anyplace I Hang My Hat Is Home
• Just Friends
• Once in a While

Dinah Shore

Dinah Shore

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) - Dinah Shore, who delighted radio and television audiences from the 1940s to the '90s with her breezy singing and Southern charm, died today. She was 76.
Miss Shore, who was recently diagnosed with cancer, died at her home after a short illness, said publicist Connie Stone. Miss Shore's two children and ex-husband, movie Western star George Montgomery, were with her when she died, Stone said.
Director Carl Reiner, who worked with Miss Shore on her television program in 1960, called her "the most alive person I ever met, absolutely interested in everything in the world and everybody in the world. And she was always sincere."
Miss Shore's television career spanned the 1950s to the early 1990s, when she had a half-hour talk show, "A Conversation with Dinah," on The Nashville Network.

In the '50s, the honey-blonde singer was one of the few women entertainers to find success as host of a TV variety program.
She started in 1951 with "The Dinah Shore Show," a live, 15-minute musical show.
The more elaborate "The Dinah Shore Chevy Show" premiered in 1956 and ran until 1963. Her singing of the jingle, "See the USA in Your Chevrolet," and signing off with a big kiss to the audience became trademarks.
From 1974-79 she was in "Dinah," from 1970-74 in "Dinah's Place," and from 1979 to 1984, "Dinah and Friends."
She was born Frances Rose Shore on March 1, 1917, in Winchester, Tenn.
A graduate of Vanderbilt University, she began her broadcast singing career in 1938 on New York's WNEW, joining the NBC network later that year and signing a contract with RCA Victor in 1940. A year later she joined Eddie Cantor's radio program; by 1943 she was starring in her own radio program, sponsored by General Foods.
More recently, her "A Conversation With Dinah" on The Nashville Network ran from August 1989 to March 1991 as a weekly show. She then did specials for TNN, including one in 1991 in which she interviewed ex-beau Burt Reynolds. She appeared on a TNN tribute show to Eddy Arnold in May 1992.
Her romance with Reynolds in the 1970s made headlines in part because she was nearly 20 years older that he.
She married Montgomery in 1943, and had two children, Melissa Ann Hime, born in 1948, and John David Montgomery, born in 1954. She divorced Montgomery in 1962. A second marriage to Maurice F. Smith in 1963 lasted only a year.
A premiere golf enthusiast, for more than two decades she played host to the Dinah Shore Classic golf tournament in the Palm Springs area. She was also a champion of animal rights.
She wrote a best-selling cookbook, "Someone's in the Kitchen With Dinah." [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385085249]
"I do seem to live for the present," she said in a 1962 Associated Press interview, "because today is so full and interesting that there just isn't time to worry about yesterday's mistakes or tomorrow's promises. An entertainer has to be an inexhaustible well. The more you give, the more you have to give."