From the Shoulder

"Georgia," they kept telling her, "you gotta get a sound." Musical soothsayers were trying to get Songstress Georgia Gibbs into line with the latest fashion. Perhaps, they thought, she should sing mechanized duets with herself (like Patti Page), or she might try an echo chamber background (like Peggy Lee). But gimmicks were not Georgia Gibbs's cup of tea. She had a big, old-fashioned voice, a good ear, a vivacious personality, and she knew how to sing from the shoulder. She would stick with plain Georgia Gibbs.

By last week Georgia Gibbs, determined to be just "a meat and potatoes girl," was picking up a handsome payoff. Her gimmickless Mercury recording of Kiss of Fire had sold well over 1,000,000 copies, was one of the summer's big hits. She was as surprised as anybody, but there was no doubt about her success: nightclub crowds demand the song in every show; song pluggers dog her footsteps. And another Gibbs record, So Madly in Love, is laddering up the bestseller lists.

Her 16 years in show business (several of them spent stooging for Funnymen Hope, Durante, Berle, Kaye) have given Songstress Gibbs a detached sense of criticism. She thinks she can understand the success of a "straight" version of Kiss of Fire. For one thing, the arrangement has life, and she takes some of the credit: the music was a familiar old tango, El Choclo; she decided the brooding rhythm made it "sound like a dirge," souped it up with a beguine tempo. But she also credits the lyrics. They are not too cheerful ("You record a happy song today, and you lay a bomb"*), in fact they are downright masochistic: Though it burns me and it turns me into ashes, / My whole world crashes without your kiss of fire.

"Let's face it," says Songstress Gibbs. "We're living in a neurotic age."

*Today's bomb is yesterday's turkey, brodie, stinker, flopperoo.

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