Record Shack Feature Artist for September 4th:

Connie Francis... in Italian, Spanish, and Yiddish

You can listen to this show in its entirety here shortly after broadcast. (Your computer's media player will open, and it will take a moment for the file to load.) Past shows can be heard at therecordshack.com.

Connie Francis was born Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero in the Italian Down Neck neighborhood of Newark New Jersey in 1938, and was the top-selling female vocalist of the 1950s and early '60s. Her big hits include “Who's Sorry Now”, “Stupid Cupid”, “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own”, “Where the Boys Are”, and “Don't Break the Heart That Loves You”. She scored 35 Top 40 hits from 1957 through 1964, and continued to sell healthy amounts of records worldwide into the 1970s. Connie was a huge talent, no doubt, but if her father hadn't convinced her to make some unorthodox choices along the way, her career would not have been as enduring as it turned out to be.

After being signed to MGM Records while barely in her teens, Connie flopped with her first nine outings. Her father had been pestering her to record the 1923 song “Who's Sorry Now”, reasoning that it could become a hit because it was a song that adults already knew and that teenagers would embrace if it were given a contemporary arrangement. Connie put him off for months, until the record label announced that they were dropping her. In the final sixteen minutes of what was to be Connie's final recording session before she went off to study medicine, she recorded the song just to appease her father. MGM released it, Dick Clark played it on American Bandstand, and it sold a million copies in the first half of 1958. Connie Francis became an international star.

When it came time for Connie to renew her contract with MGM, she took advantage of her new position of power by securing an unprecedented amount of control over her recordings. She would choose her own material, act as her own producer, and have final say over what would and would not be released. This autonomy allowed her to record material that no record executive would have ever green-lighted, but that proved to be the most important of her career.

Connie appeared on American Bandstand with her #1 fan Dick Clark and became America's rock 'n roll princess. Later, when she was booked for the Perry Como show, her father insisted that she take the opportunity to appeal to the adult market. Connie wanted to do “God Bless America”, but Perry nixed it on the well-reasoned grounds that the song was a “closer”, not appropriate for a middle-of-the-show slot. He recommended she sing the traditional Italian weeper “Mama”. After some resistance, she relented and did the song. The response was overwhelming, with the applause continuing so long after she finished singing that Como was unable to shout above it. He finally gave up and just waved the camera man to go to station break. Before that TV appearance, tickets to Connie's forthcoming appearance at Carnegie Hall had been selling poorly. After the Como show, they were being scalped on the street.

In the summer of 1959, Connie's father, who had been oh-so-right before, began to harangue Connie to record an entire album of traditional Italian songs. Connie was dead set against it, and according to her autobiography Who's Sorry Now, said to her dad, “Why is it that you're under the myopic delusion that very person born in America is Italian? There are people in this country who call macaroni “pasta”, you know. What about all those good folks in Texas and Iowa who've never even seen an Italian?...The kids will laugh me right off Bandstand.”

Her father responded, “For your information, kid, Italians are the largest single ethnic group in this country- there are twenty-five million of 'em who understand some dialect. If you want to broaden your appeal and reach an adult audience who hardly knows you and those dumb rock 'n roll songs- if you wanna play places like Vegas or the Copa- you better take my advice!”

After some more high-decibel back-and-forth, Italian style, Connie threw up her hands and said, “I wouldn't be surprised if the next thing you want me to record is a Jewish album!” Her father said, “How did you know?...You know a lot of Yiddish. And the Jewish people like you. Don't forget a Spanish LP, too!”

Despite her misgivings and her resentment at being bossed around by her father even though she was by that time the president of seven corporations, Connie made her way later that day “Down Neck” to her old Italian neighborhood and visited every Italian record shop, asking the owners to help her compile a list of songs. She also stopped everyone on the street who looked Italian and asked them to name their favorite song. In her autobiography, Connie writes, “I asked them for the names of songs they felt would appeal to Italians who had come to the United States during that mass migration of which my grandparents were a part...I requested songs that would appeal not to those who spoke educated Italian- they weren't the people who, out of necessity, left their beloved Italy- but to the peasants who had migrated from South of Rome...I wanted the songs to evoke nostalgia, to have special significance for these people. I wanted their children, and their children, too, to hear and learn the most beautiful and romantic music in the world.”

The next day she repeated the exercise in New York's Little Italy, greeting the shop owners with “Hey, paisano! Mi chiami Connie Francis, ed io canto canzoni” (“My name is Connie Francis, and I sing songs.”) She would then ask them for their favorites. At the end of that second day, she made a list of the most-loved Italian songs of the people from the Naples, Calabria, Bari, and Sicily regions.

On day three of her foreign-language odyssey, Connie paid a visit to the Jewish neighborhood where she had spent part of her childhood. She called on the rabbi, whose extended family was arriving for dinner, and settled in for an evening of listening to the family and their friends battle over which songs Connie should record for a Jewish album. They finally settled on a dozen, and then set about nailing down the proper pronunciation of the Yiddish words. Connie had decided not to sing any Hebrew songs, only Yiddish ones, because Yiddish is, according to her, “...the marvelously audacious, tongue-in-cheek language of the Jewish-American people.” She elected to concentrate on two Yiddish dialects, Litvak and Galitizianer. She says in her autobiography, “I wanted to sing the colloquial, down-to-earth music of the people. The Jewish people, people, warm, nostalgic, and emotional, have one foot firmly planted in the past, steeped in cherished and valued tradition. So I wanted to select music that had special meaning for them as Jews.”

When all was said and done, Connie had collected over one hundred Italian and Jewish records and lead sheets which she eventually winnowed down to two dozen songs to take into the studio. In early 1959, she cut three albums in three different languages in less than a week. Connie Francis Sings Italian Favorites was released in November of 1959, Spanish and Latin-American Favorites in July 1960, and Jewish Favorites plus More Italian Favorites in October of that year. The collections all stayed on the album charts for over a year, with Italian Favorites becoming the biggest-selling LP of her career, peaking at #4. (During this same time period, Connie was having singles hits in the pop market with “Lipstick On Your Collar”, “Among My Souvenirs”, and “Where the Boys Are”.)

The success of those albums led Connie to release numerous other Italian and Spanish albums through the 1960s, and she also went on to record in Greek, German, Swedish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Hebrew, Japanese, and Hawaiian.

Her father had been right again. Those foreign-language records brought her a large and fiercely loyal audience that stayed with her long after the rock 'n roll hits had faded. As she observes in her autobiography, “Because of the recordings of these several albums of ethnic songs, a tacit bond of loyalty emerged- an indefinable respect rarely accorded an artist- an unspoken blending of the hearts that never wavered, never diminished, never failed me, even during all the long, lean years.”

Links to recommended listening/viewing:

A live TV performance of "Mama"

"Siboney" from the Spanish and Latin American Favorites album

A live 1964 TV performance of the Italian standard "Al Di La"

1966 appearance on Italian TV performing a rock 'n roll song in Italian

The traditional Jewish song "Hava Nagila"