A Tribute to Blossom Dearie on the 100th Anniversary of Her Birthday

Copyright ® Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The following is drawn from Will Friedwald’s A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers [2010] which The New York Times describes as “the closest thing we have to a standard text on American Jazz and pop singers.”

In the book, Will’s provocative, opinionated and funny essays illuminate the work of more than 300 Jazz and popular vocal performers of the second half of the 20th century.

“This magisterial reference book will delight and inform anyone with a passion for the iconic music that resonates through American popular culture.”

Blossom Dearie (1924-2009)

“As everyone says, it's a baby voice. And a lot of us first heard it as children. Most of us now bald-headed Gen Xers grew up with Blossom Dearie telling us exactly what we could do with the number eight and where we could stick our conjunctions in Schoolhouse Rock, a series of highly entertaining instructional musical cartoons shown on Saturday morning TV in the seventies, alongside such uplifting fare as Scooby Doo and The Banana Splits. Most of Dearie's music concerns itself with multiplication of a different sort, yet this may be the primary attraction of her art: this juxtaposition of the preadolescent charm of her voice with the distinctly adult agenda of the songs she sings.