Bea Wain
Self-taught singer once ranked alongside Ella Fitzgerald
BEA WAIN, who has died aged 100, was one of the last wellknown singers of the Big Band era; in a 1939 poll in the US jazz magazine Down Beat, she was placed fourth in the list of best female vocalists, behind Ella Fitzgerald, Mildred Bailey and Billie Holiday.
Bea Wain, who started singing on the radio at the age of six, performed in nightclubs and on the radio show The Kate Smith Hour before her breakthrough in 1938, when the arranger Larry Clinton selected her as the vocalist for a band he was putting together. Larry Clinton and his Orchestra never achieved the recognition of bands led by Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw or Benny Goodman, but the ensemble, and Bea Wain, had a solid commercial run with jukebox favourites such as Deep Purple and Heart and Soul, both of which reached the No 1 spot in the Billboard charts.
She also had hits with Cry, Baby, Cry, and her signature song My Reverie, an up-tempo version of Claude Debussy’s piano piece Rêverie with lyrics by Larry Clinton.
Heart and Soul (“Heart and soul. I fell in love with you heart and soul”) was introduced in a short film called A Song is Born, featuring Clinton and his orchestra, and they took it out on the road to college proms. “We played at Yale. We played at Harvard. And the kids would scream for the songs, Heart and Soul and so forth,” she recalled. In Billboard’s 1939 college poll she was voted most popular female band vocalist. (Ella Fitzgerald was second.)
Beatrice Ruth Wain was born on April 30 1917, in the Bronx, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Russia, and educated at Theodore Roosevelt High School. Though self-taught as a singer, by the time she left school she was earning $2 a week as a featured performer on the Sunday morning radio show The Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour. In 1937 she recorded with Artie Shaw and performed on radio as leader of a vocal group called Bea and the Bachelors.
After a year and a half with Larry Clinton, fed up with the poor pay, she left to perform on her own. She was among the first singers to record Over the Rainbow, but the copyright holders, MGM, vetoed the release of her version until Judy Garland had performed the song in The Wizard of Oz, which opened in August 1939. By mid-september, four versions, including Bea Wain’s and Judy Garland’s, were in the Top 10.
The previous year Bea Wain had married André Baruch, a radio and television announcer whose voice introduced dozens of radio series, including The Kate Smith Hour, on which the pair had met. During the Second World War, while he served overseas, she toured army camps and naval bases singing tear-jerkers such as Kiss the Boys Goodbye, My Sister and I and I’ll Be Seeing You.
In 1945, the Baruchs began a husband-and-wife disc jockey show, Mr and Mrs Music, on WMCA Radio in New York City. They continued to work in radio together periodically over the next 40 years and Bea Wain continued to perform into her nineties.
In 1971 the couple moved to Palm Beach, Florida and they retired to California in 1980.
André Baruch died in 1991. Bea Wain is survived by their son and daughter.