With a forgotten song becoming an unlikely hit, the 87-year-old singer is happy to be back in the spotlight.
Sixty-four years ago, Connie Francis recorded “Pretty Little Baby” as one of dozens of songs in a marathon recording session that yielded three albums within two weeks. It did not, at the time, feel like a song that had the makings of a hit, so it landed on the B-side of the 1962 single “I’m Gonna Be Warm This Winter” that was released in Britain. Since then, it was more or less overlooked.
Then came TikTok and its canny ability to resurrect decades-old songs for a new generation.
Over the last few weeks, “Pretty Little Baby” has been trending on the social media app — it has been featured as the sound in more than 600,000 TikTok posts and soared to top spots in Spotify’s Viral 50 global and U.S. lists — bolstered by celebrities and influencers, like Nara Smith, Kylie Jenner, and Kim Kardashian and her daughter North, who have posted videos of themselves lip-syncing to it.
The ABBA singer Agnetha Fältskog used the song for a clip on TikTok in which she said Ms. Francis had long been her favorite singer. And the Broadway actress Gracie Lawrence, who is currently playing Ms. Francis in “Just in Time” — a play about Bobby Darin, Ms. Francis’s onetime romantic partner — also posted a video of herself lip-syncing to it, in her 1960s costume and hair.
The song’s current popularity is an unexpected twist to Ms. Francis’s long and illustrious career. In 1960, she became the first female singer to top the Billboard Hot 100 and, by the time she was 26 years old, she had sold 42 million records and had two more singles top the Billboard charts. But this particular song, which she recorded in seven different languages, remained so obscure that Ms. Francis, 87, told People magazine that she had forgotten ever recording it.
Amid the frenzy of the unexpected attention, Ms. Francis is trying to figure out how to turn this sudden attention into opportunities for herself. She and her publicist, Ron Roberts, enlisted Mr. Roberts’s son to help them set up a TikTok account for her and, in a phone interview on Thursday, she said she had been mulling the idea of emerging from retirement to do some kind of show in the next few months.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
