Frances Wayne, who sang with the Charlie Barnet and Woody Herman big bands, died in Boston on Feb 6, 1978. The local media missed the story because it was busy covering the Blizzard of ’78.
Frances Wayne on Down Beat, June 15, 1945
Although Chiarina Francesca Bertocci was born in Boston on August 26, 1919, she was raised in Somerville and graduated from high school there. She took the name Frances Wayne sometime before 1940, when she started singing with Sam Donahue’s band. In 1941 she went to New York to work with her brother, clarinetist and bandleader Nick Jerret. Also making the trip was their housemate, Ralph Burns. Frances soon had a new job singing with Charlie Barnet, and a hit with “That Old Black Magic.” Both Wayne and Burns joined Woody Herman’s band in late 1943.
Wayne’s best-known effort is “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe,” arranged by Burns and recorded with Herman’s Herd in 1945. She excelled at songs with slow tempos. Barry Ulanov, writing in Metronome in June 1945, opined that Wayne was “essentially a moody, torchy type of singer…She sings with an Italian operatic intensity of feeling, in a jazz frame molded by her fine rhythmic understanding.”
Later that year Frances Wayne married Neal Hefti, the Herman band’s trumpeter and arranger. She left the Herman band at the end of 1945. She spent the remainder of her career working as a single or with various Hefti-led ensembles, although she did sing with Shorty Sherock’s Orchestra in 1947 in a short film, Thrills of Music. She won the New Star Award in 1946 in Esquire magazine’s All American Jazz Band poll.
Wayne was in and out of the music business after the early 1950s, but when she sang, she still had her touch. Reviewing her album, Songs for My Man (Epic LN-3222) in June 1956, Down Beat called it “A nourishing recital by the estimable Miss Wayne, who has much to teach many current pop starlets concerning consistency of intonation, ungimmicked warmth, phrasing that clarifies rather than undermines lyrics, and that rare ability to combine strength with tenderness.”
And here’s “Happiness.”