RIP: Teresa Brewer

Teresa Brewer
7 May 1931 - 17 Oct 2007

ZUI this article from the Canton (OH) Repository:

Teresa Brewer, a bold-voiced singer whose novelty hit “Music! Music! Music!” established her as a jukebox favorite in the 1950s and secured her four-decade career performing in nightclubs and on Las Vegas stages, died today at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She had progressive supranuclear palsy, a brain disorder. She was 76.

Brewer was a veteran radio performer at 19, when “Music! Music! Music!” became a pop-chart smash in 1950 with its bouncy Dixieland-ensemble backup and command to “put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon.”

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Her voice was startlingly brassy for a 5-foot-2, 100-pound singer, and the disparity prompted jokes. Referring to a brash nightclub performer, entertainer Bing Crosby joked that Brewer was the “Sophie Tucker of the Girl Scouts.” Time magazine called Brewer “a topnotch singer with a voice somewhere between a blowtorch and a cello.”

Newsday.com adds this:

She was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1931. When she was 2, her mother took her to her first audition _ for a radio show called "Uncle August's Kiddie Show." Brewer sang "Take Me Out to The Ball Game," and performed on the show for pay consisting of cupcakes and cookies from the show's sponsor.

Brewer continued performing on radio shows off and on until high school, when she quit and moved to New York, where she started performing in a string of talent shows, which eventually led to a recording career.

I love "Music! Music! Music!" - it's one of my favourite songs from the '50s. (My taste runs to classical, '50s-'60s rock & roll and folk, and country & western.) The Wikipedia article on Teresa lists a few dozen songs, but that's the only one that rings a bell (though I'm sure I'd recognise others if I heard them).