Radio’s New Top Gal, A Modern
Jenny Lind
May 30, 1942
By Dorothy Roe
Pretty,- brown – eyed Dinah Shore,
the girl soldiers write during their off-duty hours, is having a wonderful time
singing for servicemen all over the country and out of it. The little southern
girl has been warbling since she was 10years old, but has been recognized as a
top flight singer for only a few years. Today Dinah is known as the modern
Jenny Lind, and her most recent title—the Elsie Janis of World War II
“EXCUSE me, please. It’s the navy.”
Dinah Shore rose from the table and followed the head waiter to the door, where
an embarrassed young sailor waited with apparent eagerness. We had been talking
about life in Tennessee, where she was born, about the war and the songs the
soldiers like. I had been asking her questions, because I wanted to know the
real girl behind that moody voice on the radio, that voice that forms a link
with home for American soldiers and sailors from Iceland to the Burma road.
“He was the sweetest thing,” said
Dinah, returning with a swish of skirts. “He wanted an autograph picture to
send to his girl back home in Alabama. He said she didn’t think he could get
it, and he just had to show her. So I signed it “To Don and Katie”—that’s their
names. And he’s rushing off to mail it to her before his ship sails.”
Dinah, who is being called the
modern Jenny Lind and the Elsie Janis of the new World war, is the girl the
soldiers write during their off-duty hours in barracks, tents and fox holes in
far-off lands. Her songs, dedicated to them, go out by short wave to every
place where American boys are fighting. And that is one reason why she recently
was voted the new No.1 girl of radio—and why I pick her as the woman of the
month.
Dinah has been singing to assorted
audiences since she was 10, and wowed her mother’s ladies’ aid society in
Nashville with a quavering rendition of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,
Baby.”
She studied to be social worker,
but when she graduated to be a social worker, but when she graduated from
Vanderbilt university in Nashvillle with a B. S. in sociology she made a
beeline for New York, and a singing career. That was in 1938. It look her two
years to make the grade, and she was about to give up and go home when things
began happening all at once.
She had a chance for a Broadway
appearance at a Times square movie theater, was signed up for a national
network program and received a long term contract for making records.
Now she’s making her first night
club appearance at New York’s Waldorf Wedgewood room, packing the place
nightly.
Dinah was born in Winchester,
Tenn., Mar. 1, 1917, just as America was entering another World war. She’s 5
feet 6 inches. You wouldn’t call her brown eyes and her generous smile make you
forget the classic rules of beauty. Her voice has a soft southern slur, which
she tries valiantly to overcome.
She was christened Frances Rose
Shore, which immediately became Fanny Rose, and inspired such lyrics as these
from her schoolmates:
“Fanny sat on a tack. Fanny Rose.
Did Fanny rise? Shore.”
She acquired the name of Dinah
after she had hit the radio networks and became known as “the Dinah girl” for
her rendition of the song of that name. Later she had her name changed legally
to Dinah Shore.
Dinah’s big sister, Elizabeth, now married,
lives in Long Island and serves as confidante, adviser and chief critic of the
singer.
Dinah receives something like
thousand letters a week from soldiers and sailors all over the world. She knows
how to sing for them because “they’re just like the boys back home.”
“They don’t ask for the flag
waving songs,” says Dinah. “Their favorite is ‘Dear Mom.’ Next comes whatever
is the top song of the week. Right now it’s ‘Blues in the Night.’”
Recently Dinah was made an
honorary member of the 7th regiment of the New York national guard,
the first woman to be so honored since Jenny Lind in 1852.
“No sir,” says Dinah, “I guess
there never was a luckier girl.”
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