Added: Jul 6, 2008

From: JBauder1948

Duration: 2:58

The McGuire Sisters came from Middletown, Ohio: Christine (b. 1929), Dorothy (b. 1930), and Phyllis (b. 1931). In 1949, they began touring veterans hospitals and military bases. By the time the tour was over, they'd come to the attention of a local bandleader, Karl Taylor, who got them a series of appearances on radio. During a break in one of these broadcasts, they decided to try their luck with the record business. A chance encounter at RCA with Kate Smith's manager got them booked for eight weeks on Kate Smith's morning show, which went out on radio and television. The Smith show also led to an audition at Decca Records who offered them a contract. All of this had happened in the space of less than 60 days, and the McGuires barely understood how extraordinary their luck had been. Finally, in the midst of the Kate Smith gig, the Decca audition and two months after they'd come to New York to audition for him, Arthur Godfrey contacted the McGuire Sisters and signed them up for his Talent Scouts show, which he followed by booking them, in place of the Chordettes ("Zorro," etc.), on his morning program. It was the start of a seven-year gig that made the McGuire Sisters one of the most well known vocal groups in the country. At Decca Records, they were put on the Coral Records imprint, after an initial short series of recordings with Jenkins, the trio came under the wing of producer Bob Thiele, who got them the best instrumental talent in the business to work with, among them arranger Neal Hefti (who was then also writing arrangements for Count Basie) and bandleader Dick Jacobs. It was still more than a year before their breakthrough, but in that year, because of their ongoing engagement on Godfrey's show, they were already the best-known female vocal group in the country. Being a regular on Godfrey's show in 1951 or 1952 was the equivalent, in terms of exposure, of hundreds of record plays in dozens of top markets each week, or hundreds of thousands of record sales. Without even scraping the Top Ten in their first year on Coral, the McGuire Sisters graced the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. Finally, in the spring of 1954, two years after they started recording for Coral, they had a number seven charting single with "Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight," which was a cover of an R&B single by the Spaniels. The trio hit number 11 with their version of Ivory Joe Hunter's "It May Sound Silly" and number ten with "He," a cover of an Al Hibbler single. Their most successful cover was "Sincerely," a song that had been recorded by the Moonglows on Chess, which the McGuire Sisters brought to number one with their version late in 1954 and early 1955. At this time in their history, even when they were a new act, the McGuire Sisters were associated with "oldies" in the minds of their own audience -- in late 1955, they recorded an album of songs from the '30s entitled Do You Remember When? featuring songs like "S' Wonderful," "Mississippi Mud" (which was then charting anew in Teresa Brewer's hands, but had been cut by Bing Crosby more than 20 years earlier), and other hits of a previous generation. The trio's music continued selling right into the late '50s, to audiences who were impervious to rock & roll. Among their specialties during this period were their recordings of movie-related songs, such as Johnny Mercer's "Something's Gotta Give" from the film Daddy Long Legs. Strangely enough, it was out of a rock & roll involvement of Bob Thiele's that the McGuire's found the song that they would be most closely associated with. In 1957, they came upon "Sugartime," a quasi-novelty tune brought back by Thiele from Norman Petty's Texas studio, where Thiele had been working with Buddy Holly (who was also on Coral). "Sugartime" was difficult to record and difficult to finish, but the resulting single went to number one and stayed there for weeks, quickly earning a gold record award. The trio charted a few more times in the early '60s, but "Sugartime" represented a peak that they never achieved, or got anywhere near, again. Phyllis McGuire began a solo career that attracted relatively little interest, and the trio recorded one album for ABC-Paramount in 1965, but they were consider passé by then. In 1968, after nearly 20 years of performing professionally, they put the trio on hiatus following a performance on The Ed Sullivan Show (Arthur Godfrey having long since left the air). They'd outlasted Godfrey, Kate Smith, and almost every other pop culture icon who'd been around at the time when they'd started out.

Channel: Music

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