I picked this at random, there's a whole lot of these types, I guess, it's not too difficult to just get 3 women together to sing.:
Try getting
five of them together the way this quintet of siblings were. They were discovered when they ran into Gordon Jenkins, the composer/arranger, in
a New York building and sang a cappella for him, impressing him so much he hustled the sisters to someone else who had an office in the same building---
radio star Fred Allen, who liked them so much he made them regulars on his Sunday night comedy show from its return in 1945 (Allen was forced to take
a year off due to hypertension) until its end in 1949. (Allen's health again had a hand; he never again hosted a radio show but became a semi-regular
on NBC's variety extravaganza
The Big Show from 1950-52 before his legendary television gig on the panel of
What's My Line). The girls enjoyed
a recording career for over a decade after their gig with Fred Allen ended; they were often compared to the Four King Sisters, but they could sing the King
Family
and the Andrews Sisters right under the table, even if they weren't as jazzy as the Andrews Sisters . . .
The Five DeMarco Sisters, "Say You Care"
! No longer availableGloria DeMarco eventually told an historian of old-time radio that, with their years with Fred Allen and everything else on radio on their night, "Sunday night
was the best night of the week for radio." For their first two years on the show, its opening was a fanfare followed by the girls singing, "Mr. Allen, Mr. Alllll-llennnnn!"
after which Allen would remark along the line of, "It isn't the mayor of Anaheim, Asuza, and Cucamonga, kiddies!" Once, Allen flipped that script---the fanfare
preceded Allen warbling, "DeMarco Sisters, DeMarco Sisters!" and---when the fanfare stopped cold---the girls chirped, "It isn't Four Chicks and a Chuck, Mr.
Allen!" On the final Allen show in 1949, the DeMarcos sang a song they wrote, "Time Doesn't Mean a Thing," maybe the only known time they sang an
original number.
The sisters experienced only one personnel change, when Terri DeMarco married actor Murray Hamilton and left the group in 1955; she was replaced by non-
relative Joyce DeYoung, who also once filled in with the Andrews Sisters. Terri DeMarco and Murray Hamilton were one of the few enduring Hollywood marriages,
ending only when Hamilton died in 1986; they had one son, David.
