_Not too long ago, Eisenhower-era middle-of-the- road pop was reproached as the noxious stuff rock ’n’ roll was designed to ravage. Yet suddenly there is a full-blown renaissance of traditional pop singing and standard songs, not from the ’70s singer-songwriters who are looking for an entree to Vegas, but from the ’50s icons themselves, living and dead. Nelson Riddle was less widely celebrated during his peak creative years than he is now, posthumously. Nat Cole sells more records as his daughter’s overdubbed ghost and as the toast of reissues than he did as a corporeal mega-star. All of Sinatra is indiscriminately in print. Jackie Gleason and Les Baxter are offered as kitsch classics. Les Paul and Mary Ford are embraced as innovators. Tony Bennett, dropped by Columbia in the ’70s, is twenty years later the same label’s Grammy-monopolizing poster boy. Doris Day, who embarrassed us in our adolescence, is rightfully proposed for sainthood. And other stars are eagerly rediscovered, among them Peggy Lee, Kay Starr, Jo Stafford, Sylvia Syms, Margaret Whiting, Shirley Horn, Chris Connor, June Christy, Johnny Hartman, Jeri Southern, Della Reese, and Annie Ross. In short, everything except coonskin caps is on the comeback trail, but then, time not only recycles—it filters a little bit, too.

At the heart of it all is Rosemary Clooney, who for twenty years has rather quietly, but persistently, turned out the finest and most consistent series of recordings by any singer who came to prominence in the ’50s. In a reversal of fortune too slick for fiction but just right for reality, she picked herself up after years of despair and inactivity to appear on Bing Crosby’s final tour in 1976, which she greatly energized during their duet, “On a Slow Boat to China.” As the tour ended, she signed with Concord Jazz and began recording annual thematic albums, usually accompanied by a small jazz ensemble. To those of us who knew her only from such dated Mitch Miller-produced novelties as “Come On-a My House” and “Mambo Italiano,” the Concord Jazz series might have been a revelation, except that in that same period Columbia prepared us by re-releasing her collaboration with Duke Ellington, Blue Rose.

Though hers was a voice and style that transcended pop fashion, the ease with which she drifted into the role of jazz matriarch was as unexpected as it was uncalculated. Until the early ’90s, when her renewed career was in full bloom, she worked with a small combo because Concord could not afford to buffer her with a full orchestra. She sang a choice repertoire of great songs because she was of an age and disposition when anything less would have been unthinkable. She made exclusively musical decisions because she was free at last from the blandishments of star-making machinery, a trade-off she accepted:

Few of us were doing what we wanted to do in [the ’50s], so I was never far away from the rest of the pack. When you had a difference with the company, the company won. I didn’t feel I had that many choices. Now it’s so luxurious because I can really think all year long about what I want to do for the next album. That’s a big consideration in my life.

She is now a more expressive singer because an increased attention to lyrics and meaning and feeling is one of the ways an artist of her stature makes up for the inevitable loss in range and lung capacity. She is able to swing because, like Bing Crosby, she has superb time, but she now swings with greater ease and confidence because...who knows? Perhaps she simply feels more in control of her talent.

One durable lesson about American music, imparted by Crosby and Louis Armstrong and underscored by their synchronous contracts with Decca and their appearances together in movies and on radio and TV, is the compatibility between the jazz and pop spheres. Clooney has long been able to inhabit both worlds without belonging entirely to either. In 1951, the year “Come On-a My House” put her at the top of the hit parade, she recorded radio transcriptions backed by a studio orchestra playing standard bop-inflected arrangements, and the vivacious command she brought to songs like “You Make Me Feel So Young” (five years before Sinatra and Riddle made it a ’50s anthem) and “My Old Flame” shows that she had the makings of a good jazz singer from the start. Improvisation wasn’t her forte, but an irrepressible rhythmic charm and the ability to read a lyric for meaning were. Those attributes were also present in her best studio hits, like “Tenderly” and “Half as Much,’’ and in her resonant 1953 treatment of “You’ll Never Know” with Harry James.

But Gresham’s law is inviolable in popular culture, and as Clooney’s novelties increased her price, her uncommon abilities were undervalued—though not by everyone. Ellington and his aide-de-camp Billy Strayhorn recognized her expressive range, and all three had reason to be pleased with the 1956 Blue Rose. Scheduling problems necessitated her dubbing the vocals, a process supervised by Strayhorn, yet she rendered a matchless “Grievin’” and one of the finest versions of “Sophisticated Lady” on record. Clooney’s mastery of tempo gives her the latitude to try any kind of song, but it is through the affecting gravity of her voice that she makes them her own. Her instrument is a wonder: the throaty, sensuous, unmistakably plangent timbre conveys rueful intimacy and a great intelligence of a kind that is read by some as wisely maternal and by others as wryly alert. She is a skilled actor in and out of song.

Like Sinatra, she inhabits her songs, addressing the lyrics as narratives. White Christmas, the top-grossing movie of 1954, is Crosby’s show (and Irving Berlin’s), but Clooney steals it in the sequence where she sings the smoky ballad “Love, You Didn’t Do Right by Me,” adducing a candor and dimension the film never regains.

_Clooney was born in Maysville, Kentucky, in 1928, and she began singing with her younger sister, Betty, at local events and amateur contests. In 1945, the two schoolgirls auditioned on station WLW in Cincinnati and won a nightly radio spot at twenty dollars a week. Within a year, band-leader Tony Pastor heard them and took them on the road. After more than two years of travel and one-nighters, Betty went home while Rosemary settled in New York, determined to have a career.

Musicians knew how good she was. She became friendly with Sarah Vaughan. And Billie Holiday paid her the ultimate compliment, considering the source: “You’re a good singer.” After Clooney sang “Taking a Chance on Love” on Tallulah Bankhead’s radio extravaganza, The Big Show, Art Tatum sent her a dozen roses. In 1950, Clooney and the equally little-known Tony Bennett were hired as panelists for the TV show Songs for Sale, which required them to perform submissions by amateur songwriters. No songs were discovered, but the panelists were. Mitch Miller, who joined the show the next season, signed them to Columbia, where Bennett went from “Rags to Riches,” and Clooney, an Irish-Catholic Southerner, sang—reluctantly and under threat from Miller, who was ready to kill her contract if she refused—an Armenian folk song in an Italian accent, backed by harpsichord. “Come On-a My House” was the number one record in the summer of 1951. In short order, Rosemary was signed to Paramount, made the cover of Time, and landed her own TV show, The Lux Show Starring Rosemary Clooney.

Her singing underwent something of a transition in the years 1958-61 as her novelty era faded and she focused on albums. She maintained a close friendship with Crosby (they taped a syndicated daily radio show from her Beverly Hills home), and the first, and best, of their two duet albums, Fancy Meeting You Here (arranged by Billy May), captures their poised interaction. Two years later she and Nelson Riddle, who had been the music director for her 1956 TV show, conjured an equally upbeat collection, Rosie Solves the Swingin’ Riddle. By 1960, they had fallen in love, and in the following year he chose to commemorate their secret romance (they were married to others) by writing her a sumptuous album of lavish arrangements called Love.

Documenting her most mature work to that date—a highly personal selection of songs, some of them fairly obscure, each treated with suitably diverse interpretations—Love should have been her breakthrough. In Marc Blitzstein’s “I Wish It So,” for example, her rare and elegant expression of youthful erotic longing makes the most of the song’s Irish air and diction. No one has realized as well as she the desire and frustration at the core of Burke and Van Heusen’s “Imagination,” or emphasized as clearly the contrast between the light sauciness of the verse and the womanly daring of the chorus in Cole Porter’s “Why Shouldn’t I?” She was just thirty-two and serving notice of how much command she had. But RCA inexplicably refused to release the album. In 1963, Sinatra acquired it for Reprise, but the public was unresponsive and it soon disappeared, never to achieve proper recognition until Reprise reissued it in the more receptive clime of 1995.

The initial failure of Love boded ill, and a follow-up with the pessimistic title Thanks for Nothing was less enchanting. The ’60s proved as dark for her as the ’50s had been bright. Her marriage fell apart, a long-standing dependency on pills took its toll, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, which occurred a few feet from where she was standing, sent her reeling into despair and ultimately an isolated cell in a psychiatric ward. (The details are set forth in her 1977 memoir, This for Remembrance.)

Clooney credits Crosby’s 1976 invitation to join his show at New York’s Uris Theater and London’s Palladium with reviving her career and life. Crosby also wrote the introduction to her book, but he could scarcely have imagined the extent of her achievement in subsequent years. The most telling evidence of her new level of accomplishment is her series of albums for Concord Jazz. With little fanfare, she produced the classiest shelf of songbooks since Ella—Crosby, Holiday, Berlin, Arlen, Mercer, Van Heusen, Porter, Ira Gershwin, Rodgers, Hart, and Hammerstein. The singing is remarkably assured, as though nothing had been amiss—the timbre is richer, the rhythms more pointed. Clooney is the queen of vowels, and contrary to most singers, she can mine a long e as handsomely as a short a. She lands on them with emphasis, draws them out with a slight shiver, and imbues them with feeling as though they were mid-word oases. But she was a decade ahead of the curve—the cycle hadn’t come around yet. Not until the early ’90s, when she began appearing annually at New York’s Rainbow & Stars and mounting unusually enterprising Carnegie Hall concerts, did a new generation seek her out.

_The revival of interest in Clooney and other performers of her generation owes much to the realization that the songs they sing—beyond the once-fashionable hits that made them stars—are indispensable treasures that no one else can bring to light as well. The jazz bias for music over words probably begins with the idea that lyrics are conveniences with which improvising singers manipulate melody, a prejudice that resulted from the drivel many early jazz singers were forced to redeem. Antipathy toward classic lyrics is also entrenched in early rockcrit, which, born in the era of singer-songwriters, when Broadway and movie musicals were dying on the vine, sneered at the alleged profusion of “June/moon” images and rhymes. June/moon? In the work of Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Johnny Burke, Hoagy Carmichael, Yip Harburg, Sammy Cahn, Dorothy Fields, Ira Gershwin, Andy Razaf, Alan Jay Lerner, Oscar Hammerstein II, Mitchell Parish, or Irving Berlin? Not likely, except as an inside joke. Some of the derision was plain ignorance. But a more potent factor was also at work—a defensiveness against the manifest maturity of great lyrics, which invariably deal with sex, love, loneliness, and sex. Many of us in our forties found ourselves responding to singers in a different way than we had a few years earlier, attending not only to their timbre and melody but to the stories they tell. One such convert was Paul McCartney. They hadn’t met, but when Clooney turned sixty-four in 1992 he sent her a framed, inscribed copy of his song, “When I’m Sixty-Four.” For some reason, few post-rock singers (exceptions include Mary Cleere Haran, Cassandra Wilson, and Jeannie Bryson) can channel the meanings of pre-rock songs. Is it the often literary and metaphorical language that is alien to them, the rhythms on which the songs are dependent, or the required subtlety in phrasing? Those with a theatrical background tend to over-emote in a non-swinging Streisandian bellow, as if determined to clobber the songs before the songs can clobber them. Clooney, however, instructs by example.

_By the early ’90s, Clooney had become something of a minimalist, exacting greater yield with less exertion from songs as familiar as “A Foggy Day” or “How Deep Is the Ocean?” or even “Don’t Fence Me In.” At the same time, she became a candidly auto-biographical singer. Few performers can make their lives mirrors for the lives of their audiences, distilling their experiences into truths of universal application while keeping a safe distance from self-indulgence and nostalgia. Clooney could and did. She turned her attention to her own history in a series of increasingly evocative meditations on the music of World War II, her sister act with Betty, the long road of a girl singer, the spell of New York, her love for Nelson Riddle, and her “demi-centennial” as a pro. In every instance, her voice—with its brawny edge, heady vibrato, subtle throb, and unequivocal humor—reclaimed the material as a shared musical past. Never has her singing been more scrupulously under control—her near-parlando way of hitting a note and then nudging it up or down a tone or half-tone, her four-square phrase endings, her unostentatious cresting of high notes, and not least, her distinctive grip on sibilance. Billie Holiday justifiably observed that no one sang the word love like she herself did. No one sings the word kiss like Rosemary Clooney.

_The Concord Jazz project itself is unprecedented. On 1991’s For the Duration, she cuts through the melodrama of such songs as “These Foolish Things,” “White Cliffs of Dover,” and “I’ll Be Seeing You,” performing them straight-up with spare and efficient arrangements by John Oddo, who adds strings to the quintet on a few selections. Among the pleasures of these records is the increasing closeness between Clooney, tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton, and trumpeter Warren Vaché, which recalls the Holiday-Teddy Wilson sessions of the ’30s. On “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You, Baby,” a song that can easily be over-dramatized but is treated by Clooney as a medium-up roll, Hamilton’s tenor sax issues forth obbligato, contrasting its robust timbre with hers and accentuating her interpretive focus. On Girl Singer, she prefaces “Straighten Up and Fly Right” with the audition tape she and Betty made of the Nat Cole novelty back in the ’40s. She is at her best sailing into the verse of “More Than You Know,” illuminating the lyric of “Autumn in New York,” turning “Miss Otis Regrets” into a well-bred swinger, and uncovering a little-known gem by Richard Rodney Bennett and Johnny Mercer, “Lovers After All.” On Still on the Road, she is supported by a first-rate L.A. big band of the sort that disappeared with movie musicals.

Nowhere is the earthy, almost chilling directness of her voice better captured than on Do You Miss New York? Turn up the volume and it’s as though she were singing right in front of you, the declarative phrasing shaded by a breathy echo that suggests the recitations of Ben Webster, whose tenor saxophone similarly echoed out of a fund of experience and emotion.

On the sensational Demi-Centennial, Clooney revisits various stages in her life and finds an unlikely common ground on which to renew a motley of songs that could appear on no other singer’s album, among them “Danny Boy,” “I’m Confessin’ That I Love You,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Mambo Italiano,” and “White Christmas.”

Perhaps her recovered place in American music at century’s end is best indicated by two events in 1996. In June, she was inducted into the Tampa-based International Jazz Hall of Fame, along with a dozen or so other living eminences including Benny Carter, Lionel Hampton, Al Grey, Harry Edison, Ray Brown, Dave Brubeck, Illinois Jacquet, Ella Fitzgerald, James Moody, and as many posthumous inductees, including Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Nat Cole, Billy Eckstine, and Cab Calloway—and no one in the audience or the press or among the musicians questioned the appropriateness of her inclusion. Indeed, her segment was a highlight of the evening. Then, in December, she was the final performer in a long Carnegie Hall salute, Ira Gershwin at 100. Most of the singers and dancers were from Broadway or cabaret, though a couple (Ruth Brown, Vic Damone) were veteran entertainers. Hardly any of them were able to make the lyrics seem anything more than clever, if that. After three hours, Clooney was introduced, and before she had sung eight bars of the verse to “A Foggy Day,” the air was palpably altered. For the first time all night, one found oneself thinking about the song and remembering the tribute was to Ira, not George. Backed by a big band, she was also the only performer who injected the serene lilt of jazz, substituting the spaciousness of swing and her particular veracity for the rampant narcissism that had preceded her.

_Humbert Humbert, dining with Lolita in juke-box heaven, commented on the “nasal voices of those invisibles serenading her, people with names like Sammy and Jo and Eddy and Tony and Peggy and Guy and Patty and Rex, and sentimental song hits, all of them as similar to my ear as her various candies were to my palate,” adding that Lo herself was a “disgustingly conventional little girl.” He didn’t count Rosie in his rosary, but he might have—back then. Not even Humbert would hear in the Rosemary Clooney of the ’90s anything remotely like sentimentality, anonymity, or convention. She has made her own way into the more enduring pantheon.