Jo Stafford Is Dead

Meet Jo Stafford, the song siren, radio and television performer of the Golden Age.Ms. Stafford died at the age of 90 on July 18th 2008. Read the story here.She was born November 12th 1917 in Coalinga, California. She originally studied opera but quickly found success as a jazz singer in a family trio with her talented sisters Christine and Pauline Stafford. “The Stafford Sisters” became a mainstay on Los Angeles radio station KHJ in the 1930s.

After she joined a group named “The Pied Pipers,”, Jo and the new group caught the eye of the Tommy Dorsey who signed them for his radio program in the 1940s. That gig did not last long, but then she went solo and her career spiraling upward to where she was a household name in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact she hosted her own radio program on NBC called the Chesterfield Supper Club.She sold 25 million albums for Columbia Records in the 1950s and 1960s including such notable hits as “You Belong to Me.” A complete discography and list of her songs is here.

Jo Stafford’s husband Paul Weston died in 1996. Paul was also an entertainer. The couple had teamed together for years on stage as the comedy duo “Jonathan and Darlene Edwards.” She is survived by her son Tim Stafford who runs the Corinthian Record label, which is the organization which won the rights to many of Jo’s old recordings.In the first video below, Jo Stafford and Rosemary Clooney sing Autumn Songs. In the second video, she sings a medley with the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald. In the third of the videos, hear “You Belong to Me.”