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    Robert Gordon, Punk Rocker Turned Rockabilly Revivalist, Dies at 75

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    Weary of the angry and aggressive sound of New York’s musical underground of the late 1970s, he returned to rock’s roots and seeded a rockabilly revival.Robert Gordon, a 1950s-influenced rocker with a silky baritone and towering pompadour who emerged from the New York punk underground of the 1970s to help stoke a rockabilly revival, died on Oct. 18 in a hospice in Manhattan. He was 75.His sister Melissa Gordon Uram said the cause was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Gordon had been the frontman for the buzzy CBGB-era band Tuff Darts when he traded his punk attitude for a tin of Nu Nile pomade and released his first album, a collaboration with the fuzz-guitar pioneer Link Wray, in 1977. At the time, 1950s signifiers like ducktail haircuts and pink pegged slacks had scarcely been glimpsed for years outside the set of “Happy Days” or the Broadway production of “Grease.”But, turning his back on both the pomp of ’70s stadium rock and the rock ’n’ roll arsonist ethos of punk, Mr. Gordon helped seed a rockabilly resurgence that would flower during the 1980s, with bands like the Stray Cats and the Blasters hitting the charts and punk titans like the Clash and X also paying their respects.Neo-rockabilly became the soundtrack to a broader wave of ’50s nostalgia during the Reagan years, marked by Buddy Holly-esque Wayfarer sunglasses, James Dean haircuts and ubiquitous images of tail-fin Cadillacs in music videos, in retro-themed malt shops and at the Hard Rock Cafe.With a look and sound that seemed to travel by time machine from Sun Studio circa 1956, Mr. Gordon was a curious presence in an era when the rock world seemed split between Fleetwood Mac-type rockers with feathered tresses and Sex Pistols-style punks with spiked locks. Lester Bangs, the gonzo rock critic, once said of Mr. Gordon’s neo-hepcat look that he could be a museum display labeled “Bopcatus Americanus.”Mr. Gordon never achieved the fame of the musicians who followed in his wake, but his influence was felt. “Many fans and music historians believe that, had he been recording in the ’50s, he might have become a rockabilly legend,” the music journalist Mark McStea wrote in Guitar Player magazine last year. “Instead, he kick-started the worldwide rockabilly revival.”He never scored a hit on the level of the Stray Cats’ “Stray Cat Strut” or another ’50s-nostalgia chestnut, Los Lobos’ cover of Richie Valens’ “La Bamba,” which hit No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart in 1987.Mr. Gordon, left, with his band backstage at the Lone Star Cafe in New York in 1981. From left: the guitarist Chris Spedding, the drummer David Van Tieghem and the bassist Tony Garnier.John Kisch Archive/Getty ImagesBut, with Mr. Wray — who carved his place in rock history with the ’50s instrumental classics “Rumble” and “Raw-Hide” — he hit No. 83 on the Hot 100 with “Red Hot,” a cover of a 1955 R&B song by Billy “The Kid” Emerson that became a rockabilly staple when Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men covered it two years later. If it was too early for him to reap a windfall from the rockabilly wave he had helped begin, Mr. Gordon also had the misfortune of coming in early with songs that would become hits for other artists. His 1981 solo album, “Are You Gonna Be the One,” included the single “Someday, Someway,” a Gene Vincent-inspired number written by his fellow retro-rocker Marshall Crenshaw, which peaked at No. 76 a year before Mr. Crenshaw’s version hit the Top 40.His 1978 album, “Fresh Fish Special,” which featured the Jordanaires, a vocal group famous for backing Elvis Presley, included the song “Fire,” written by his friend Bruce Springsteen, with Mr. Springsteen himself on piano. The song became a smash for the Pointer Sisters, climbing to No. 2 on the Hot 100. Later in his career, Mr. Gordon bristled at the rockabilly pigeonhole, referring to his sound as “roots music” and citing his forays into country and other genres. Still, rockabilly was in his bones, and he said that his life changed the first time he heard Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”“I just remember hearing that one as a kid, I guess I was 9 years old, and it just opened new horizons,” Mr. Gordon recalled in a 2010 Australian radio interview. “The sound of that echo, and of course his smoldering delivery, was great. For a little kid, it was just amazing.”Robert Ira Gordon was born in Washington on March 29, 1947, the second of four children of Samuel Gordon, an antitrust lawyer and later a judge, and Arline (Rose) Gordon, a painter who did sets for regional theater companies.Growing up in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase area of Maryland, Mr. Gordon lived in a house where a record player or radio was usually blaring, Ms. Uram said in an interview. Their parents had a huge record collection, heavy on jazz and opera, and the children cranked up the volume on everything from rockabilly to Motown to British Invasion bands.But Mr. Gordon set his sights on a different retro genre when he turned to a singing career. “He fashioned himself after crooners like Frank Sinatra and Jack Jones,” Ms. Uram said. “He could sing ballads like the best of them.”He moved to New York in the early 1970s to pursue a career in music, starting out in a folk trio called Reunion. But when punk hit, with its stripped-down sound and frenetic energy, an echo of early rock ’n’ roll, he joined the fray.His band Tuff Darts became a fixture in the scene centered on CBGB, the Bowery punk cauldron where future industry game-changers like Talking Heads, Blondie and the Ramones were launching careers.But Tuff Darts never broke out like the others, and Mr. Gordon left the band before it recorded its first album in 1978.“I left that group because, I’ll tell you the truth, because it was pretty sadistic,” he said on “The It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Podcast” in 2020. “The lyrics were pretty chauvinistic. I was into more of the roots thing.”With the pouty good looks and Eisenhower-era attire of an old-school Brooklyn street tough, Mr. Gordon also tried his hand at acting. He played a killer in a 1976 film, “Unmade Beds,” which also featured Blondie’s Debbie Harry, and a greaser thug in “The Loveless,” a low-budget “Wild Ones”-style motorcycle-gang movie from 1981 starring Willem Dafoe and co-directed by Kathryn Bigelow.Mr. Gordon in performance at a festival in Spain in 2020.Juan Naharro Gimenez/RedfernsIn addition to Ms. Uram, Mr. Gordon is survived by his wife, Marylee, whom he married in 1995; his son, Jesse, from a previous marriage; and another sister, Jackie Gordon Spalding.Over the course of a half century, Mr. Gordon continued to churn out albums, collaborating with influential musicians like Chris Spedding, who has played guitar with Elton John and Paul McCartney, and Danny Gatton, the guitarist known for what he called “redneck jazz.” His final album, “Hellafied,” with Mr. Spedding, is set to be released by Cleopatra Records in November.“I always thought that Rob never had the stardom that he should have had,” Ms. Uram said. “He was incredibly handsome and photogenic and his voice was amazing, and his choice of musicians to play with was always spot on.”Still, Mr. Gordon played an important role as a bridge between eras, helping keep a treasured American music genre alive. He recorded his first album in April 1977. His idol, Elvis Presley, died four months later. More

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      At 91, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott Still Wants to Tell You a Story

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      TOMALES, Calif. — At a friend’s rustic home in a tiny village about an hour north of San Francisco, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was trying to decide what to eat for breakfast. But he couldn’t resist telling a story.“Some of the best oatmeal I ever had was in the L.A. County Jail,” the singer said from beneath an old felt cowboy hat, a blue bandanna tied around his neck. In 1955, while living in Topanga Canyon, he was pulled over on the Pacific Coast Highway because the taillight on his Ford Model A was broken. “They told me I could pay a $25 fine or spend six days in the clink.”He was interested in religion at the time, and thought he’d finally have the chance to read the Bible, but his cellmates were too noisy. “I was extremely bored, and the police needed the space for more bona fide criminals, so they kicked me out on the second day,” he said. “They even gave me bus fare to get home.”In his decades as a wayfaring folk singer, Elliott, who turned 91 in August, has amassed volumes of such tales, stories that blur the line between reality and fantasy, and translate as a particular, increasingly endangered strain of American folklore. He’s released nearly two dozen albums since 1956, alone and with the banjo player Derroll Adams (who died in 2000), but wasn’t recognized with a Grammy until 1995.He’s known as an interpreter rather than a writer, singing beloved versions of “If I Were a Carpenter” by Tim Hardin, “San Francisco Bay Blues” by Jesse Fuller and the traditional “South Coast.” Though he hasn’t put out an album since “A Stranger Here” in 2009, he continues to perform live. His gigs this fall included a show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on Sept. 24; a short run of concerts in Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina start this week, followed by a tribute to John Prine and stops in California.It’s a welcome return to the road. Elliott played 44 concerts in 2019 before the pandemic forced a 15-month pause, the longest he’s ever gone without stepping onstage. In August, he rescheduled two shows after contracting the coronavirus, though he described his case as “mild” after taking the antiviral drug Paxlovid.Born Elliot Charles Adnopoz to middle class, Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he became so enamored with our nation’s iconography — the rodeo, merchant vessels, boxcar-hopping folkies, Peterbilt trucks — that he transformed himself into a peripatetic cowboy, a maritime enthusiast and a troubadour chasing the wind.Today, he’s one of the last of the ’50s era folk music revivalists and beatniks who eschewed their parents’ conventions. He studied with Woody Guthrie, inspired Bob Dylan and hung out with Jack Kerouac. He was recorded by Alan Lomax, and has performed with Phil Ochs, Nico and Prine. He has covered, befriended and worked alongside American folk icons for so long that he’s become one.“He wears the cloak and scepter of the American minstrel; he’s that guy,” said Bob Weir, a founding member of the Grateful Dead and Elliott’s longtime friend. The pair met in the ’60s when Elliott was opening for Lightnin’ Hopkins at a club in Berkley, and Weir, who was 16 at the time, crashed into the dressing room through a skylight to avoid being carded. “He dropped me into a conversation that we’ve been having for incarnations; he pretty much had me nailed to the wall,” he said. “I became acutely aware of who he was and why they call him Ramblin’ Jack.”After decades of touring, the nonagenarian is resilient. He moves with swagger in his carefully chosen outfits.Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesAs the legend goes, Elliott’s nickname originated with the folk singer Odetta’s mother. “I knocked, and the door opened a crack, and I heard her say, ‘Odetta, Ramblin’ Jack is here,’” Elliott said. “I adopted it right away.”Since then, Elliott has spent much of his life traveling between the East and West Coasts, with a little Texas in between. He finally settled in a modest rental in rural West Marin, an arresting stretch along coastal Highway 1. In these parts, Elliott’s become a sort of mythological figure, recognized because of his career but also, more generally, for his vibe, a kind soul in Western wear who cares just as much about the local postman as he does about his days on the Rolling Thunder Review.“He doesn’t distinguish between the Joan Baezes and the Bob Dylans, and the person who’s driving the bus or the truck,” his daughter Aiyana Elliott said in an interview in nearby Marshall, Calif. “He loves working people, but also all people who he comes in contact with.”In 2000, Aiyana made a documentary about her father, “The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack,” that explored the real-life costs of building a mythic artistic persona and finds Aiyana grappling with Elliott’s unrelenting restlessness. In a moment of frustration, she begs for alone time with him, which he never grants. That plotline, she revealed, was more loaded than it seemed. “If there was anything keeping me from my father,” she explained, “it was that he had abominably bad taste in women for decades.”At the behest of his daughter, Elliott has been recording his tales for posterity at the home of his friend Peter Coyote, the actor, author and ’60s era counter cultural activist. “They trusted I could keep him on track,” Coyote said in an interview at his home. “He comes over here with a really good sound man, and people like Bobby Weir, Peter Rowan and all these other musicians he’s known drop in.”He lives quite modestly, a lot of people don’t realize just how modestly,” Elliott’s daughter Aiyana said. “But I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone so rich in friends.”Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesWeir emphasized the importance of capturing Elliott’s history: “I’m a big proponent of making some space for him in the Smithsonian,” he said, “because an enormous part of America’s musical heritage lives in that body.”Known for his storytelling and larger-than-life stage presence, Elliott’s greatest superpower may be his way with the guitar. “The way he attacks it, I only hear that in him,” Weir said. Elliott’s mighty flatpicking is also what made Frank Hamilton take notice amid the American folk music revival, when the two musicians were drawn to Washington Square Park. The former Weavers member and a founder of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, called Elliott a “folk guitarist par excellence” and a “very good raconteur.” “He and I, and a lot of other young men at the time, were imbued with a romanticism of the open road,” he said in a phone interview.Though Elliott has written few songs, a road trip with Hamilton spurred his most famous original, “912 Greens,” inspired by the house of a folk singer they crashed with in New Orleans. “That’s a talkin’ song,” Elliott said, meaning that he’s telling a story over acoustic guitar. “Guy Clark told me he stole the guitar part I’m playing for one of his songs, and I was honored.” Another conversational composition, “Cup of Coffee” was covered by Johnny Cash on his 1966 album of novelty songs “Everybody Loves a Nut.”Recalling his earliest encounter with Dylan, Elliott described him as “a nifty little kid with peach fuzz, he couldn’t shave yet.” (The future Nobel Prize winner was then a teenager visiting Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey.) Elliott wrote “Bleeker Street Blues” for Dylan in 1997, after the singer-songwriter was hospitalized with severe chest pains from histoplasmosis, a fungal infection. “Later on, we’ll join Woody and Jerry and Townes/But right now we all need you, so stick around,” Elliott speak-sings over acoustic guitar.From left: Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Elliott and Dylan onstage in 1975. Elliott performed as part of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue that year.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesThe pair grew close when they were neighbors in the Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village, where they bonded over a shared love of Guthrie, and other music of the burgeoning folk revival. Since then, fans have accused Dylan of aping Elliott’s style in his early days, particularly his nasally delivery, but that doesn’t bother the elder. “I helped him get into the musician’s union,” he said. Today, the pair aren’t in regular contact, but when they do cross paths, it’s with a great deal of warmth. “Love you Jack,” Elliot recalled Dylan saying after a gig in Oakland in 2014. “I thought, ‘Wow, you’ve never told me that before,’” Elliott said.Unlike Dylan, and many of his other peers, Elliott hasn’t seen much commercial success — partly because he deals in niche genres, but also because “he’s not been great at managing his career, per se,” according to Aiyana. Because he hasn’t written many songs, he receives far fewer royalties on album sales and streams. The bulk of his income comes from touring, which has its own risks. More than anything, Elliott has sought freedom, and human connection. “He lives quite modestly, a lot of people don’t realize just how modestly,” Aiyana said. “But I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone so rich in friends.”After decades of touring, the nonagenarian is resilient. He’s recovered from triple bypass surgery and two “little strokes” that left him unable to play the guitar for about a week. His hearing is assisted by small aids, but his mobility and stamina befit a much younger man. He moves with swagger in his carefully chosen outfits.After a breakfast of oatmeal with berries and chopped pecans, and a plethora of stories about schooner ships, James Dean, big rigs, Leon Russell and other subjects between, Elliott loaded into his Volvo station wagon to wind through the cypress-lined roads overlooking the inlet Tomales Bay. He passed through his friend Nancy’s lavender field, and by the dunes at Dillon Beach where he and his friend Venta hike. In a vulnerable moment, he recalled his wife, Jan, the last of five, who died from alcoholism in 2001. “I was very devastated when she left us,” he said.In 1995, the pair were living in a motor home in Point Reyes while she worked for Ridgetop Music, owned by Jesse Colin Young of the Youngbloods. One day, they decided to head north to sight see. “I was driving and admiring the bay on the left, and she was in the passenger seat and saw a sign on the right,” he said. “We pulled in and rented the house on the spot.” He’s lived in it ever since.“An enormous part of America’s musical heritage lives in that body,” Bob Weir said of Elliott.Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesDuring the hourlong drive, Elliott’s profile set against the bucolic pastures rolling by and magnificent views of the ocean, he recalled other friends and acquaintances he’s known over the years, some who’ve moved away or died. Pointing to a run-down farmhouse, he wondered what happened to its owner: “I haven’t seen him in years, and I hope he’s OK.” Though Elliott lives in one of the most beautiful places in America, it’s clear that, for him, the landscapes are an added benefit. It’s the people here that truly nourish him.Later, at Nick’s Cove, a local restaurant with a pier that stretches over the bay, Elliott chatted with a woman who had bellied up to the bar to watch a baseball game. “She runs a big dairy,” he explained as he headed toward a table facing the night’s performer. “Hey, I know that guy!” He lit up at the sight of Danny Montana, a fellow cowboy folk singer dressed in a hat and boots. On this September night, he covered many of Elliott’s friends, like John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker and Guy Clark, and Elliott hummed along in between bites of a hamburger. When he finished his set, Elliott invited Montana to sit at our table, and then complimented his “rig” as he packed up his gear to leave.In just a few weeks, Elliott’s own show would be hitting the road once again. He was particularly excited about his travel companion, a former Navy pilot who also loves horses. “He just got a brand-new, red, Ford F-350 diesel pickup truck, and he’s going to be my driver,” he said with a grin. “He’s a good driver and a great guy.” More

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      Joni James, Heartfelt Chanteuse of the 1950s, Dies at 91

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      A top-selling artist known as the “Queen of Hearts,” she had a voice tinged with longing and melancholy and was an early influence on Barbra Streisand.Joni James, a best-selling chanteuse whose records climbed the Billboard charts in the 1950s and who was an early influence on Barbra Streisand, died on Feb. 20 in West Palm Beach, Fla. She was 91. Her family announced the death, in a hospital, in an online obituary. No cause was specified.Known to her fans as the “Queen of Hearts,” Ms. James had an intimate vocal style tinged with longing and melancholy. She recorded nearly 700 songs and sold more than 100 million records — 24 going platinum and 12 gold.“I always sang from the heart,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1996. “I always sang about life and how it affected me. I’m Italian. Italians are passionate people.”Her debut single, “Why Don’t You Believe Me,” reached No. 1 on the three Billboard charts in 1952 (in those days there were separate charts for sales, radio play and jukebox play) and made her an overnight sensation.Her next showstoppers included “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” a cover of the Hank Williams hit, which helped Ms. James establish herself as one of the first pop singers to bring country into the pop mainstream.In the mid-1950s, she had four Top 10 charted hits, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Have You Heard?,” which sold more than three million records, and “How Important Can It Be?,” which sold more than four million.In May 1959, she was among the first pop singers to perform a solo concert at Carnegie Hall, where she was backed by a 100-piece orchestra and 30 singers.It was Ms. James’s recording of “Have You Heard?” that drew Ms. Streisand to her. “My favorite singer while I was growing up was Johnny Mathis,” Ms. Streisand told The New York Times in 1985. “I also listened a lot to Joni James records and sang her hit ‘Have You Heard?’ at club auditions, but I didn’t really want to sound like her.”Whether she wanted to or not, some early Streisand recordings did recall those of Ms. James, at least to the ear of the Times critic Stephen Holden, who wrote in 1991, “Without having developed a rounded vibrato, she sounded a lot like her childhood idol, Joni James, a singer with only rudimentary technique who infused early-’50s pop ballads with a waiflike plaintiveness.”There was enough of a connection between the two singers that Ms. James was invited to be part of a star-studded cast for the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award tribute to Ms. Streisand in 2001. Onstage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Ms. James performed one of Ms. Streisand’s signature songs, “The Way We Were,” accompanied by Marvin Hamlisch on piano.Ms. James recorded nearly 700 songs in her career and sold more than 100 million records, but she largely left the music scene in 1964. Giovanna Carmella Babbo was born in Chicago on Sept. 22, 1930. Her father, Angelo Babbo, who sang operatic arias when he was a shepherd boy in Italy, had come to America at 18. He died at 36, when Giovanna was 5. That left her mother, Mary Chereso, struggling to raise six children by herself during the Depression.Giovanna babysat and worked in a bakery to help the family and to raise money to train as a ballerina. A petite woman — she stood 5 feet tall and wore a size 4 shoe — she dreamed of going to New York and dancing with the American Ballet Theater.That didn’t happen. After graduating from high school, she toured Canada with a local dance group, then took a job as a chorus girl at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. By then she had changed her first name, after her high school newspaper kept misspelling it. Later, when she worked as a model, her managers told her to find a new surname; Ms. Babbo promptly turned to the phone book and picked “James” at random.While she was focused on dance, singing was second nature to her. She grew up singing in the school choir and said her influences were the blues and Gregorian chants. Later, when she sang in nightclubs and entered talent contests, audiences always reacted warmly to her, but she didn’t consider herself a real singer like her idols, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Doris Day.Ms. James was finally noticed by MGM Records, which signed her to a contract in 1952. Her first single had been written as “You Should Believe Me,” but she tweaked the lyrics and the title, making it “Why Don’t You Believe Me.” She paid for and organized the recording session, which included a 23-piece orchestra. The song was an instant hit and sold more than two million copies.She married Anthony Acquaviva, her manager, arranger and conductor, in 1956 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Mr. Acquaviva, known as Tony, oversaw sessions on which she was accompanied by strings, which helped define her lush sound.She appeared on all the major television variety shows, including those hosted by Ed Sullivan, Perry Como and Andy Williams. She was in demand around the world and became the first American to record at Abbey Road Studios in London, where she made five albums.But at the height of her fame, her husband developed diabetes, and she largely left the music scene in 1964 to care for him. She told The Los Angeles Times that this included washing one of his legs six times a day to prevent it from getting gangrene and being amputated. He died in 1986.Though she still performed occasionally while he was still living, she had stepped so far away from the limelight that the newspapers called her “The Garbo of Song.”She then met Bernard A. Schriever, a retired Air Force general who oversaw the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. They married in 1997, and with his encouragement she eased her way back onstage, performing memorable concerts in New York at Town Hall, Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall.“I was a bent-wing sparrow,” she told The Oakland Tribune, “and he pushed me to come back.”Ms. James is survived by her son, Michael Acquaviva; her daughter, Angela Kwoka; her brothers, Angelo Babbo and Jimmy Contino; her sisters, Clara Aerostegui and Rosalie Ferina; and two grandchildren. General Schriever died in 2005.Asked by The Daily News in 2000 why she sang so many sad songs, Ms. James had a simple answer: “Because I know what they mean.” More

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      Phyllis McGuire, Last of a Singing Sisters Act, Dies at 89

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPhyllis McGuire, Last of a Singing Sisters Act, Dies at 89Starting in the ’50s, the McGuire Sisters were one of America’s most popular vocal groups, their three-part harmonies a balm to audiences rattled by rock ’n’ roll.The McGuire Sisters in 1953 — from left, Christine, Phyllis and Dorothy. They became staples of television variety shows. Credit…Associated PressDec. 31, 2020Updated 4:58 p.m. ETPhyllis McGuire, the lead singer and last surviving member of the McGuire Sisters, who bewitched teenage America in the 1950s with chart-topping renditions of “Sincerely” and “Sugartime” in a sweet, innocent harmony that went with car fins, charm bracelets and duck-tail haircuts, died on Tuesday at her home in Las Vegas. She was 89.The Palm Eastern Mortuary in Las Vegas confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Ms. McGuire, with her older sisters Christine and Dorothy, shot to success overnight after winning the televised “Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts” contest in 1952. Over the next 15 years, they were one of the nation’s most popular vocal groups, singing on the television variety shows of Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, Andy Williams and Red Skelton, on nightclub circuits across the country and on records that sold millions.The sisters epitomized a 1950s sensibility that held up a standard of unreal perfection, wearing identical coifs, dresses and smiles, moving with synchronized precision and blending voices in wholesome songs for simpler times. Their music, like that of Perry Como, Patti Page and other stars who appealed to white, middle-class audiences, contrasted starkly with the rock ’n’ roll craze that was taking the world by storm in the mid-to-late ’50s.In 1965, as the trio’s popularity began to fade, Phyllis McGuire’s image as the honey-blonde girl next door was shattered by published reports linking her romantically with Sam Giancana, a Chicago mobster with reputed ties to the Kennedy administration and a Central Intelligence Agency plot to enlist the Mafia in what proved to be unsuccessful attempts to assassinate the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.Ms. McGuire with the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana at a nightclub in 1962. Their relationship shattered her girl-next-door image. Credit…Associated PressMr. Giancana and Ms. McGuire, who had been followed by federal agents for several years, appeared before a grand jury in Chicago. He refused to answer questions and was jailed for contempt. She testified that she had met him in Las Vegas in 1961, traveled with him to Europe, the Caribbean and elsewhere and accepted his gifts in a continuing relationship. She was aware that he was a reputed gangster, she said, but insisted that she knew nothing of his underworld activities.“It makes me look terrible,” she told reporters afterward. “It would be different if I were on my own, but I’m not a single — I’m part of a trio. My sisters and my parents — they’re brokenhearted about this.”The McGuire Sisters retired from public appearances in 1968, Christine and Dorothy to raise families, Phyllis to continue as a soloist. She appeared regularly in Las Vegas, where she lived for the rest of her life in a mansion with a swan moat and a replica of the Eiffel Tower rising through the roof.After serving a year for contempt, Mr. Giancana was released, and he fled to Mexico, where he lived in exile until arrested by the Mexican authorities in 1974. Deported to the United States, he agreed to testify in a prosecution of organized crime in Chicago but was killed by an unknown assailant at his home in 1975.Ms. McGuire remained unapologetic about her relationship with Mr. Giancana. “Sam was the greatest teacher I ever could have had,” she told Dominick Dunne of Vanity Fair in 1989. “He was so wise about so many things. Sam is always depicted as unattractive. He wasn’t. He was a very nice-looking man. He wasn’t flashy. He didn’t drive a pink Cadillac, like they used to say.”In 1985, the sisters reunited for a comeback and performed for almost two decades at casinos and clubs in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and elsewhere. They sang their own hits, 1950s pop hits and Broadway show tunes, and Phyllis did impersonations of Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, Pearl Bailey and Ethel Merman.“They take me back to the olden times, the beautiful times,” Barbara Pattison, a fan in Toronto, told People magazine as the comeback began. “They are not loud and they are not distant. They bring back the beauty in music.”Ms. McGuire in a celebratory mood in 1995 at her home in Las Vegas. She sang regularly at clubs and casinos in the city. Credit…Lennox McLendon/Associated PressPhyllis McGuire was born in Middletown, Ohio, on Feb. 14, 1931, the youngest of three daughters of Asa and Lillie (Fultz) McGuire. Her mother was a minister of the First Church of God in Miamisburg, Ohio., and her father was a steelworker. The sisters began singing in church when Phyllis was 4. They performed at weddings and other services, then at veterans’ hospitals and military bases.Phyllis’s 1952 marriage to Neal Van Ells, a broadcaster, ended in divorce in 1956. They had no children. Dorothy McGuire died in 2012, and Christine died in 2019. She is survived by nieces and nephews. Her longtime companion, Mike Davis, an oil and gas magnate, died in 2016.While making Las Vegas her home, for years she kept a Park Avenue apartment and then a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.After winning “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the sisters were regulars on Mr. Godfrey’s morning radio and television shows for six years. They made the covers of Life and Look magazines and signed with Coral Records, a Decca subsidiary. Their first Top 10 hit was “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight” in 1954. “Sincerely” (1955) and “Sugartime” (1958) were No. 1 hits; they and “Picnic” (1956) each sold over a million copies.The McGuire Sisters were one of the many white groups that covered 1950s R&B hits, many by Black artists, in what critics called blander versions though better-selling ones. They also sang for Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and for Queen Elizabeth II.In 1995, an HBO movie, “Sugartime,” focused on the Giancana-McGuire affair, with John Turturro as the mobster and Mary-Louise Parker as Phyllis. The sisters gave their last big performance on a 2004 PBS special, “Magic Moments: The Best of ’50s Pop.” They were inducted into the National Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 1994, the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2001 and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame in 2009.Long past the customary retirement years for a singer, Ms. McGuire remained passionate about her career.“I don’t fear living, and I don’t fear dying,” she told Vanity Fair in 1989. “You only live once, and I’m going to live it to the fullest, until away I go. And I’m going to continue singing as long as somebody wants me.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More