My mom was a classically trained vocalist and pianist. From her early teens to her early 20’s in the mid 1940’s she sang locally with a local opera company and also with a big band, often featured on local radio in the Harrisburg and Philly PA area. While she enjoyed signing Big Band music, opera was her real passion and she was good, very good. At one point her vocal teacher told her that she had progressed too far, way far beyond his ability to train her any further and that she had a great talent and encouraged her to go to NY to study which she did.
Right around the time she met my father a year after WWII ended she was offered an audition with the Metropolitan Opera - a rare and prestigious opportunity. But my father had just proposed to her and she choose another path. I guess my brother and I can be glad for that, along with my father.
I remember as a child, my mother turning on the Metropolitan Opera Saturday afternoon matinee live broadcast and singing along. While I really couldn’t appreciate it at the time, I now understand what a beautiful voice she had, a lyric soprano who if she had taken a different path, one where she didn’t marry my father and give birth to me and my brother, she may have been as famous as Beverly Sills or my mother’s favorite opera singer – Leontyne Price.
Yes, and she was really that good and not only in my opinion but some years after her death in 1996, I met a man who was in the radio business back when and who knew my mother back when she sang on the radio and who told me that she had the voice of an angel and had been offered several contracts to sing with some rather famous big bands at the time along with several opera companies, and could have even had a movie career if she wanted as she was also quite beautiful.
When I was in my later teens, my mom hated most of the pop and rock music I was listening too - most of which she called screeching and caterwauling.
But one day, just after I bought my first stereo system one of the first cassette tapes I bought was Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits.
My mom came in my room, I think the song playing at the time was Blue Bayou and I thought a first was going to tell me to turn it down, but actually she wanted to know who that signer was as she thought she had a beautiful voice, great vocal control, was in my mother’s opinion, very talented and not singing to her true potential. I was shocked.
Her work with Nelson Riddle was awesome. What's New? is perfection.
Years later for Christmas I bought my mother the Linda Ronstadt Nelson Riddle album “What’s New†and she also found it perfection. She also loved the Gloria Estefan album Mi Tierra. Gloria Estefan another signer who my mother thought had a really good voice.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5Rl8BSEdsEwww.youtube.com/watch?v=WWAWQmhqWGoI’ve often wondered what my mother would have made of Amy Lee of Evanescence.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vPLh5LLl6k