Ruth Lowe born 12 August 1914

Ruth Lowe (August 12, 1914 – January 4, 1981) was a Canadian pianist and songwriter.

After living in her early teens in California, she became a songplugger, playing piano in Toronto music stores at 16, promoting the sale of sheet music. With Sair Lee she performed in a two-piano team in Toronto nightclubs, and under the name Nancy Lee she worked in 1933 with the singer George Taggart on radio station CKNC.

She was staff pianist with CKLC; sang with The Shadows, a female vocal trio, on CKNC; and performed with Red Hickey's dance band before joining Ina Ray Hutton's all-girl orchestra 1935-7 in the USA.  Ruth was working in the 'Song Shop' in Toronto when Ina Ray Hutton brought her All-Girl band (the Melodears) to town. Her piano player had taken ill, and Ina was frantically trying to locate a good-looking blonde lady replacement. Ruth Lowe auditioned, and became the regular pianist in Ina Ray's band. She was pianist 1937-9 with the publishers Bregman, Vocco, and Conn in Chicago.

At age 23 (1938), Ruth married Harold Cohen, a Chicago music publicist. It was a very happy marriage that only lasted one year until Harold's tragic demise during an operation in 1939. In her deep grief, Ruth returned to live in Toronto. In her lonely apartment, she composed "I'll Never Smile Again". Americans think of this song as American. Canadians think of this song as Canadian.

The song was first heard on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) radio program 'Music By Faith', in an arrangement by Percy Faith, a fine Canadian musician who would soon go on to fame in the USA and the world. Approximately a year later, Ruth passed a copy of the tune to a saxophone player in the Tommy Dorsey band, hoping to have Dorsey hear the tune.

Dorsey thought the tune had much merit, and arranged it for his very young singer, Frank Sinatra. It was Sinatra's first great hit, and really launched Sinatra on his phenomenal career. Later she composed still another Frank Sinatra hit "Put Your Dreams Away", Frank's 'signature' song, (which was also played at his funeral).  The latter song has also been recorded by Perry Como and Barry Manilow, and was sung by Gisèle MacKenzie on CBC Radio in 1950.

Lowe retired from performance in the early 1940s but continued to compose. In 1945, Ruth married Nathan Sandler and the union produced two sons, Tommy (who was named after the famous Tommy Dorsey) and Stephen.

Ruth Lowe passed away on 4 January 1981 at Toronto General Hospital.  She was 66 years old.

She received a Grammy Award, when the 23 May 1940 version of "I'll Never Smile Again," entered the Grammy Hall of Fame, in 1982. The American Hall of Fame inducted her posthumously. The Canadian Walk of Fame declined to recognize Ruth Lowe, in any way. The musical Ruthie, based on Lowe's life and employing several of her songs, was staged by Dinah Christie and produced in 1990 by the Smile Theatre Company of Toronto. The songwriter's story is chronicled in the video documentary I'll Never Smile Again: The Ruth Lowe Story (Great North Productions Inc., 2001), which was broadcast as part of the television series The Canadians.

In 2003, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame belatedly inducted Ruth Lowe.

(Info various mainly The Canadian Encyclopedia and Wikipedia)

Dean Martin born 7 June 1917

Dean Martin (born Dino Paul Crocetti; June 7, 1917 – December 25, 1995) was an American singer, actor, comedian, and film producer. One of the most popular and enduring American entertainers of the mid-20th century, Martin was nicknamed the "King of Cool" for his seemingly effortless charisma and self-assuredness. He was a member of the "Rat Pack" and a star in concert stage/nightclubs, recordings, motion pictures, and television. He was the host of the television variety program The Dean Martin Show (1965–1974) and The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast (1974–1985).

Martin's relaxed, warbling crooning voice earned him dozens of hit singles including his signature songs "Memories Are Made of This", "That's Amore", "Everybody Loves Somebody", "You're Nobody till Somebody Loves You", "Sway", "Volare", and "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?".

If there had to be one image for cool, the one man to fit it would be Dean Martin. Born in Steubenville, Ohio, he spoke only Italian until age five. Martin came up the hard way, with such jobs as a boxer (named Kid Crochet), a steel mill worker, a gas station worker and a card shark.

In 1946 he got his first ticket to stardom, as he teamed up with another hard worker who was also trying to hit it big in Hollywood: Jerry Lewis. The duo were to become one of Hollywood's truly great teams. They lasted 11 years together, and starred in 16 movies. They were unstoppable, but personality conflicts broke up the team.

Even without Lewis, Martin was a true superstar. Movies such as The Young Lions (1958) and Rio Bravo (1959) brought him international fame. One of his best remembered films is in Ocean's Eleven (1960), in which he played Sam Harmon alongside  Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford.

As Martin's solo career grew, he and Frank Sinatra became friends. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Martin and Sinatra, along with friends Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, and Sammy Davis, Jr. formed the Rat Pack, so-called after an earlier group of social friends, the Holmby Hills Rat Pack centered on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, of which Sinatra had been a member.

The Martin-Sinatra-Davis-Lawford-Bishop group referred to themselves as "The Summit" or "The Clan" and never as "The Rat Pack", although this has remained their identity in popular imagination. The men made films together, formed part of the Hollywood social scene, and were politically influential (through Lawford's marriage to Patricia Kennedy, sister of President John F. Kennedy).

The Rat Pack were legendary for their Las Vegas Strip performances. For example, the marquee at the Sands Hotel might read DEAN MARTIN---MAYBE FRANK---MAYBE SAMMY. Their appearances were valuable because the city would flood with wealthy gamblers. Their act (always in tuxedo) consisted of each singing individual numbers, duets and trios, along with seemingly improvised slapstick and chatter. In the socially charged 1960s, their jokes revolved around adult themes, such as Sinatra's womanizing and Martin's drinking, as well as Davis's race and religion. Sinatra and Martin supported the civil rights movement and refused to perform in clubs that would not allow African-American or Jewish performers.

As a singer, Martin copied the styles of Harry Mills (of the Mills Brothers), Bing Crosby, and Perry Como until he developed his own and could hold his own in duets with Sinatra and Crosby. Like Sinatra, he could not read music, but he recorded more than 100 albums and 600 songs.Elvis Presley was said to have been influenced by Martin, and patterned "Love Me Tender" after his style.

On June 27, 1964 Dean Martin hit the charts with “EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY”, the record was a huge success.  Dean went to the top of the Hot 100, #1 on August 15, moving a Beatles song “A HARD DAY’S NIGHT” out of the #1 spot.  His hit record was on the Hot 100 for 15 weeks.  The record crossed over to the Adult Contemporary chart where it held the #1 spot for 8 weeks.  “Everybody Loves Somebody” sold well over a million copies and Dean was awarded a “Gold Record”. Prior to his hit “THAT’S AMORE” had been Dean’s signature song, now it became “Everybody Loves Somebody”.  He sang it as the theme of his weekly TV variety show from 1965-1974.

Martin, like Elvis, was influenced by country music. By 1965, some of Martin's albums, such as Dean "Tex" Martin, The Hit Sound of Dean Martin, Welcome to My World and Gentle On My Mind, were composed of country and western songs by artists such as Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. Martin hosted country performers on his TV show and was named "Man Of the Year" by the Country Music Association in 1966.

But the image of Martin as a Vegas entertainer in a tuxedo has been an enduring one. "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?", a song Martin

performed in Ocean's 11, did not become a hit at the time, but has enjoyed a revival in the media and pop culture.

For three decades, Martin was among the most popular acts in Las Vegas. Martin sang and was one of the smoothest comics in the business, benefiting from the decade of comedy with Lewis. Martin's daughter, Gail, also sang in Vegas and on his TV show, co-hosting his summer replacement series on NBC. Daughter Deana and son Ricci are singers who continue to perform. Eldest son Craig was a producer on Martin's television show. Though often thought of as a ladies' man, Martin spent a lot of time with his family; as second wife Jeanne put it, prior to the couple's divorce, "He was home every night for dinner."

Film wise Dean went on to more critically acclaimed ventures, such as in Sergeants 3 (1962), Toys in the Attic (1963), and Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1963). In 1965 Martin explored a new method for entertaining his fans: Television. That year he hosted one of the most successful TV series in history: "The Dean Martin Show" (1965), which lasted until 1973. In 1965 it won a Golden Globe Award. In 1973 he renamed it "The Dean Martin Comedy Hour", and from 1974 to 1984 it was renamed again, this time "The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts". It became one of the most successful TV series in history, skewering such greats as Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, James Stewart, George Burns' Milton Berle, Don Rickles Phyllis Diller, and Joe Namath.
 
After the 1980s Martin took it easy--that is, until his son, Dean Paul Martin died in a plane crash in 1987. Devastated by the loss, from which he never recovered, he walked out on a reunion tour with Sinatra and Davis. His final Vegas shows were at Bally's Hotel in 1990. There he had his final reunion with Jerry Lewis on his 72nd birthday. Martin's last two TV appearances involved tributes to his former Rat Pack members. On December 8, 1989, he joined stars in Sammy Davis Jr's 60th anniversary celebration, which aired a few weeks before Davis died from throat cancer. In December 1990, he congratulated Frank Sinatra on his 75th birthday special.

Martin was diagnosed with lung cancer at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in September 1993, and in early 1995 retired from public life. He died of acute respiratory failure resulting from emphysema at his Beverly Hills home on Christmas morning 1995, at age 78. The lights of the Las Vegas Strip were dimmed in his honor. His tombstone features the epitaph "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime", the name of his signature song.

Martin is buried at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. (Info mainly edited from Wikipedia)

Frank Sinatra born 12 December 1915

Francis Albert Sinatra (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an iconic American jazz-oriented popular singer and Academy Award-winning actor.

Sinatra was born Dec. 12, 1915, in Hoboken, N.J., and as a schoolboy nursed ambitions to be a journalist. As a teenager, he organized a singing group, the Hoboken Four, which won first prize on the Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour. Following graduation from the Drake Institute, he spent several years singing in New Jersey roadhouses before finding work in the late 1930s as a radio studio singer in New York City. In 1939, while performing at a club in New Jersey, he was heard by Harry James, who signed him to appear with his new swing band. After touring with James (1939), he rose to prominence with Tommy Dorsey's orchestra (1940–2).

Breaking away from Dorsey, in 1943 he began working solo and serving as emcee on the popular radio programme, Lucky Strike Hit Parade. He quickly emerged as one of the earliest and most adulated teen idols, and the hysteria he engendered in his ‘bobby-soxer’ fans culminated in rioting at the Paramount Theatre in New York on Columbus Day, 1944. He remained a popular radio star throughout the 1940s and recorded many hits for Columbia Records (1943–52), but becoming unhappy with conditions there he moved to Capitol Records (1953–62). His recordings during this period came to epitomize American popular singing at its finest, with a style that maintained fidelity to a song's lyric and mood while imbuing it with subtle elements of jazz beat and phrasing. In 1960 he was a co-founder of Reprise Records, which he recorded for exclusively after 1963.

He also had a successful career as a film actor, beginning as a straight actor in Higher and Higher (1943). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he played dramatic roles that brought him considerable acclaim, including From Here to Eternity (1953), for which he received an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. This work brought him into the Hollywood community, where he became a member of the ‘Rat Pack’, a group that included his occasional concert partners, Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin. During these years he also had highly publicized marriages to film stars Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow.

His regular appearances at Las Vegas and such locales, the lifestyle that inevitably went with such a celebrity (bodyguards, hangers-on), a temperament that involved him in occasional fights, fabulous wealth, and various business ventures - all this added up in some people's minds to alleged involvement with the underworld, but nothing beyond personal acquaintances was ever proved. In practice he was most generous in his gifts to both individuals and organizations, and his overall status in the entertainment industry earned him the title ‘Chairman of the Board’. He announced his retirement in 1971 but he returned for various concerts and tours in the next two decades. Among the many testaments to his special status as a pop superstar was his 1980 recording of ‘New York, New York’ which made him the first singer in history to have hit records in five consecutive decades.

 

By 1994 Sinatra was experiencing memory lapses, but that did not keep him from performing publicly. He merely added the use of a prompter (device that shows the words of a song) to remind him of the lyrics. 

After celebrating his eightieth birthday at a public tribute, new packages of recordings were released and became instant best-sellers. But Sinatra's health continued to deteriorate in the 1990s. On the evening of May 14, 1998, Sinatra died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California.
(info mainly from biography.com)

Here's Frank Sinatra's "The Girl From Ipanema" performance from the "A Man and His Music + Ella + Jobim " special, part of the Frank Sinatra: Concert Collection 7-DVD box set.