Jo Elizabeth Stafford (November 12, 1917 – July 16, 2008) was an American traditional pop singer, whose career spanned five decades from the late 1930s to the early 1980s. Admired for the purity of her voice, she originally underwent classical training to become an opera singer before following a career in popular music and by 1955 had achieved more worldwide record sales than any other female artist. Her 1952 song "You Belong to Me" topped the charts in the United States and United Kingdom, becoming the second single to top the UK Singles Chart and the first by a female artist to do so.
Born in remote oil-rich Coalinga, California, near Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley, Stafford made her first musical appearance at age 12. While still at high school, she joined her two older sisters to form a vocal trio named the Stafford Sisters, who found moderate success on radio and in film. In 1938, while the sisters were part of the cast of Twentieth Century Fox's production of Alexander's Ragtime Band, Stafford met the future members of the Pied Pipers and became the group's lead singer. Bandleader Tommy Dorsey hired them in 1939 to perform vocals with his orchestra. From 1940 to 1942, the group often performed with Dorsey's new male singer, Frank Sinatra.
In addition to her singing with the Pied Pipers, Stafford was featured in solo performances with Dorsey. After leaving the group in 1944, she recorded a series of pop songs now regarded as standards for Capitol Records and Columbia Records. Many of her recordings were backed by the orchestra of Paul Weston. She also performed duets with Gordon MacRae and Frankie Laine. Her work with the United Service Organizations giving concerts for soldiers during World War II earned her the nickname "G.I. Jo". Starting in 1945, Stafford was a regular host of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) radio series The Chesterfield Supper Club and later appeared in television specials—including two series called The Jo Stafford Show, in 1954 in the U.S. and in 1961 in the UK.
Stafford married twice, first in 1937 to musician John Huddleston (the couple divorced in 1943), then in 1952 to Paul Weston, with whom she had two children. She and Weston developed a comedy routine in which they assumed the identity of an incompetent lounge act named Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, parodying well-known songs. The act proved popular at parties and among the wider public when the couple released an album as the Edwardses in 1957. In 1961, the album Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in Paris won Stafford her only Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album and was the first commercially successful parody album. Stafford largely retired as a performer in the mid-1960s, but continued in the music business. She had a brief resurgence in popularity in the late 1970s when she recorded a cover of the Bee Gees hit, "Stayin' Alive" as Darlene Edwards. In the 1990s, she began re-releasing some of her material through Corinthian Records, a label founded by Weston. She died in 2008 in Century City, Los Angeles, and is interred with Weston at Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City. Her work in radio, television, and music is recognized by three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Jo Elizabeth Stafford was born in Coalinga, California, in 1917, to Grover Cleveland Stafford and Anna Stafford (née York)—a second cousin of World War I hero Sergeant Alvin York. She was the third of four children. She had two older sisters, Christine and Pauline, and one younger sister, Betty. Both her parents enjoyed singing and sharing music with their family. Stafford's father hoped for success in the California oil fields when he moved his family from Gainesboro, Tennessee, but worked in a succession of unrelated jobs. Her mother was an accomplished banjo player, playing and singing many of the folk songs that influenced Stafford's later career. Anna insisted that her children should take piano lessons, but Jo was the only one among her sisters who took a keen interest in it, and through this, she learned to read music.
Stafford's first public singing appearance was in Long Beach, where the family lived when she was 12. She sang "Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms", a Stafford family favorite. Her second was far more dramatic. As a student at Long Beach Polytechnic High School with the lead in the school musical, she was rehearsing on stage when the 1933 Long Beach earthquake destroyed part of the school. With her mother's encouragement, Stafford originally planned to become an opera singer and studied voice as a child, taking private lessons from Foster Rucker, an announcer on California radio station KNX. Because of the Great Depression, she abandoned that idea and joined her older sisters Christine and Pauline in a popular vocal group the Stafford Sisters. The two older Staffords were already part of a trio with an unrelated third member when the act got a big booking at Long Beach's West Coast Theater. Pauline was too ill to perform, and Jo was drafted in to take her place so they could keep the engagement. She asked her glee club teacher for a week's absence from school, saying her mother needed her at home, and this was granted. The performance was a success, and Jo became a permanent member of the group.
The Staffords' first radio appearance was on Los Angeles station KHJ as part of The Happy Go Lucky Hour when Jo was 16, a role they secured after hopefuls at the audition were asked if they had their own musical accompanist(s). Christine Stafford said that Jo played piano, and the sisters were hired, though she had not previously given a public piano performance. The Staffords were subsequently heard on KNX's The Singing Crockett Family of Kentucky, and California Melodies, a network radio show aired on the Mutual Broadcasting System. While Stafford worked on The Jack Oakie Show, she met John Huddleston—a backing singer on the program, and they were married in October 1937. The couple divorced in 1943.
The sisters found work in the film industry as backup vocalists, and immediately after graduating from high school, Jo worked on film soundtracks. The Stafford Sisters made their first recording,"Let's Get Together and Swing" with Louis Prima, in 1936. In 1937, Jo worked behind the scenes with Fred Astaire on the soundtrack of A Damsel in Distress, creating the arrangements for the film, and with her sisters she arranged the backing vocals for "Nice Work If You Can Get It". Stafford said that her arrangement had to be adapted because Astaire had difficulty with some of the syncopation. In her words: "The man with the syncopated shoes couldn't do the syncopated notes".
By 1938, the Staffords were involved with Twentieth Century Fox's production of Alexander's Ragtime Band. The studio brought in many vocal groups to work on the film, including the Four Esquires, the Rhythm Kings, and the King Sisters, who began to sing and socialize between takes. The Stafford Sisters, the Four Esquires and the Rhythm Kings became a new vocal group called the Pied Pipers. Stafford later said, "We started singing together just for fun, and these sessions led to the formation of an eight-voice singing group that we christened 'The Pied Pipers'". The group consisted of eight members, including Stafford—John Huddleston, Hal Hooper, Chuck Lowry, Bud Hervey, George Tait, Woody Newbury, and Dick Whittinghill.
As the Pied Pipers, they worked on local radio and movie soundtracks. When Alyce and Yvonne King threw a party for their boyfriends' visit to Los Angeles, the group was invited to perform. The King Sisters' boyfriends were Tommy Dorsey's arrangers Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston, who became interested in the group. Weston said the group's vocals were unique for its time and that their vocal arrangements were much like those for orchestral instruments.
Weston persuaded Dorsey to audition the group in 1938, and the eight drove together to New York City. Dorsey liked them and signed them for 10 weeks. After their second broadcast, the sponsor visiting from overseas heard the group sing "Hold Tight (Want Some Seafood Mama)". Until this point, the sponsor knew only that he was paying for Dorsey's program and that its ratings were very good; transcription discs mailed to him by his advertising agency always arrived broken. He thought that the performance was terrible and successfully pressured the advertising agency representing his brand to fire the group. They stayed in New York for several months, landing one job that paid them $3.60 each, and they recorded some material for RCA Victor Records. Weston later said that Stordahl and he felt responsibility for the group, since Weston had arranged their audition with Dorsey. After six months in New York and with no work there for them, the Pied Pipers returned to Los Angeles, where four of their members left the group to seek regular employment. Shortly afterwards, Stafford received a telephone call from Dorsey, who told her he wished to hire the group but wanted only four of them, including Stafford. After she agreed to the offer, the remaining Pied Pipers—Stafford, Huddleston, Lowry, and Wilson—traveled to Chicago in 1939. The decision led to success for the group, especially Stafford, who featured in both collective and solo performances with Dorsey's orchestra.