The New Canaries

When recording stars do not exist, it is necessary for artists-and-repertory men to invent them. The newest, dewiest invention is a plump, pleasant-voiced 19-year-old named Jennie Smith. In the year and a half since she graduated from high school in Charleston. W. Va. (pop. 75,000), Jennie, who looks like the second-prettiest girl at a high-school prom, has taken on a new name (old one: Jo Ann Kristof), learned to gush cute quotes ("I'm crazy about mustard sandwiches ... I sing sad songs saddest when I'm happy") and do a very fair imitation of throaty, top-ranking Jazz Singer June Christy. To the tub-thumping rhythm of an intense promotional campaign by RCA Victor, Jennie just finished a month of bouncing about the country buttering up disk jockeys and celebrating the release of her first LP (called Jennie, and decorated with a torchlit photo of its star nervously inhabiting a low-cut black gown).

Victor's 1958 model has not yet made the sales charts, and she still has some things to do (dancing lessons, reducing sessions), but there is a good chance that she will sell. Jennie's voice is still maturing from callow to mellow, but it is husky and wholesome, sounds fine in simple arrangements of When I Fall in Love and the little-girlish My Very Good Friend in the Looking Glass, timidly torchy in I'm a Fool to Want You. From her Victor royalties, Jennie has an excellent prospect of becoming rich enough to retire before she is old enough to vote, but to do it she will have to outdraw some other new singers. A sampling of competing canaries:

EILEEN RODGERS is a pretty, 24-year-old song belter--whose belting is the wide, black-leather kind worn by unruly teenagers--signed up a couple of years ago by Columbia's bearded bush-beater, Mitch Miller. One of the best of the polysyllabic-vowel school, e.g., "There's a wall between us, and it's not made of sto-o-o-one/ Although we're together I feel so alo-o-o-one"), she blasts out her ballads in what, if she did not use phony electronic echo effects, would be a good voice. A $750-a-week nightclub performer (last week, Boston) who hit the charts heavily last year with Miracle of Love, Eileen may have another hit with her current disk It Ain't So.

TRISH DWELLEY is the 17-year-old blonde youngster with the warm, blonde voice whose appearance as an unknown schoolgirl on Jack Paar's Tonight TV show in October developed a bolognoid scent when someone remembered that she had sung a year and a half ago with an outfit called the Dream Weavers. While Paar clutched his wounds. Trish grabbed a recording contract with Decca. She might hit the big time, with the help of a cute nickname (short for Patricia), a fine nose for publicity and a sentimental, "There's-a-tree-in-the-meadow" kind of voice. Her first record, Far Away, a sugary lament for vagrant love, is sure to be mooned over by teen-agers on the outs with their steadies.

CAROL STEVENS is a deep-purple (D below middle C) jazz singer who wears wicked black sheaths and Vampira makeup, and is visually and musically the most striking of the new girl singers. Her audiovisual analogue would be a bass sax wrapped in a lace nightie. Using a vocabulary of oo's, ee's and ah's, she sings one entire side of her first LP (That Satin Doll; Atlantic) almost completely without words. This could sound like a cat trapped in a rain barrel, but somehow manages not to. In the best of her all-but-wordless songs (the composer, Phil Moore, calls the technique "Woman-as-an-Instrument"), Carol fogs out three minutes of lowdown vowels, then wraps it up with wacky sexiness in a single phrase of explicit English: "Saved it all for you." Titles on the reverse side--Lying in the Hay, Keep on Doin' What You're Doin'--leave little doubt as to what it is all about.

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