Handy through Stephen Sondheim and beyond, bringing together straightforward jazz and pop singers (Billie Holiday, Perry Como) hybrid artists who moved among genres and combined them (Peggy Lee, Mel Tormé) the leading men and women of Broadway and Hollywood (Ethel Merman, Al Jolson) yesterday’s vaudeville and radio stars (Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor) and today’s cabaret artists and hit-makers (Diana Krall, Michael Bublé). The music crosses from jazz to pop and back again, from the songs of Irving Berlin and W. Here is the most extensive biographical and critical survey of these singers ever written, as well as an essential guide to the Great American Songbook and those who shaped the way it has been sung. From giants like Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland to lesser-known artists like Jeri Southern and Joe Mooney, they have created a body of work that continues to please and inspire. Will Friedwald’s illuminating, opinionated essays-provocative, funny, and personal-on the lives and careers of more than three hundred singers anatomize the work of the most important jazz and popular performers of the twentieth century.
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