Bea Wain — vocalist was hit-making star of the big-band era
Bea Wain, one of the last surviving vocalists of the big-band era, whose four No. 1 hits included a swing adaptation of a Debussy melody, died Saturday in Beverly Hills. She was 100.
The cause was congestive heart failure, her daughter, Bonnie Baruch Barnes, said.
Ms. Wain, who was largely self-taught and whose Bronx accent vanished when she sang on the radio, started performing when she was barely 6 years old and continued past 90.
She got her big break in 1938, when she emerged from the chorus on the radio show “The Kate Smith Hour” to sing an eight-bar solo. The arranger Larry Clinton, who was listening, needed to hear no more. He was forming a band at the time and quickly signed her to be its vocalist.
That summer she sang with Clinton and his orchestra at the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle, N.Y.
She also appeared regularly on the popular radio show “Your Hit Parade” and later on “Your All-Time Hit Parade.”
In a short-lived recording career (curtailed by a two-year strike by musicians over royalties that began in 1942), Ms. Wain was voted most popular female band vocalist in Billboard’s 1939 college poll. (Ella Fitzgerald was second.) She had No. 1 hits with versions of the standards “Deep Purple” and “Heart and Soul” as well as “Cry, Baby, Cry” and, most notably, “My Reverie,” an uptempo version of the classic Debussy piano piece “Reverie” with lyrics by Clinton.
She also sang wartime tear-jerkers like “Kiss the Boys Goodbye,” “My Sister and I” and “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
Ms. Wain and her husband, the Frenchborn baritone and radio announcer Andre Baruch, later became a disc jockey team in New York.
She made $50 a week (about $870 in today’s dollars) working every night all summer with the Clinton band at Glen Island, and only $30 for a three-hour session recording four songs. That meant that while songs like “My Reverie” and “Deep Purple” reaped a fortune for others, she made all of about $7.50 (or about $130 today) for each song.
Ms. Wain was among the first singers to record “Over the Rainbow,” but MGM, which owned the rights, barred the release of her version until the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” which included Judy Garland’s performance of the song, opened in August 1939. By mid-September, four versions, including Ms. Wain’s and Garland’s, were in the Top 10.
Beatrice Ruth Wain was born on April 30, 1917, in the Bronx, near Crotona Park, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. Her mother was the former Sara Levin. Her father, Morris, was a men’s custom tailor on Fifth Avenue.
Long before she graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School, she was making $2 a week as a featured performer on the Sunday morning radio show “The Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour.”
“I knew exactly what I wanted to do, which was to be a singer,” she said in an interview with KUOW, a public radio station in Seattle, in 2007.
In 1937, Ms. Wain recorded with Artie Shaw. (She was listed on the label as Bea Wayne; unbeknown to her, the record company had misspelled her surname and abbreviated her first name.) She later headed a vocal group called Bea and the Bachelors.
She married Baruch in 1938. During World War II, he served overseas while Ms. Wain performed at Army camps and naval bases. After the war, the couple were hosts of “Mr. and Mrs. Music,” a daily program on WMCA in New York, on which they doubled as disc jockeys and interviewers.
In 1973 they moved to Palm Beach, Fla., where they had a similar radio show. They retired to California in 1980.
Baruch, who later did play-by-play coverage of Brooklyn Dodgers baseball games with Vin Scully, died in 1991. In addition to their daughter, Ms. Wain is survived by their son, Wayne Baruch, a music producer, and two grandchildren.