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retired
I remember seeing the flick "Where The Boys Are" on television as a little kid .. it shaped my image of Fort Lauderdale and brought Connie Francis and her music to me ...
Connie Francis on Wikipedia
Connie Francis Discography
Connie Francis Youtube Channel
Connie Francis, (born Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero; December 12, 1938), is an American pop singer, and the top-charting female vocalist of the 1950s and 1960s. She is best known for her downbeat ballads delivered in her trademark sobbing, emotive style. In addition to her signature song, Who's Sorry Now?, her many hits include Lipstick on Your Collar, Where the Boys Are, and Stupid Cupid. She topped the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart on three occasions with Everybody's Somebody's Fool, My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own and Don't Break the Heart That Loves You. She also was known for her early relationship with the singer and teen heart-throb Bobby Darin.
Biography
Early life
Francis was born in the Italian Down Neck, or Ironbound, neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. She attended Newark Arts High School in 1951 and 1952. She and her family moved to Belleville, New Jersey, where she graduated Salutatorian from the Belleville High School Class of 1955. After an appearance on Ford Startime, Francis was advised to change her name from Franconero to something more easily pronounceable and to quit the accordion that was part of her act. The story goes that every record label she had tried had turned her down. Finally, even when MGM decided to take her, it was basically because the track she wanted to record, Freddy, happened to be the name of the son of a company executive. Francis' first single, Freddy, (1955) and her next nine singles were commercial failures.
Career
Early in her career, Francis was introduced to Bobby Darin, an up-and-coming singer and songwriter. Darin's manager arranged for him to help write several songs for her. Despite some disagreement about material, after several weeks Darin and Francis developed a romantic relationship. Francis' strict Italian father would separate the couple whenever possible. When her father learned that Bobby Darin had suggested the two lovers elope after one of her shows, he ran Darin out of the building at gunpoint, telling Bobby to never see his daughter again. Francis saw Darin only two more times - once when the two were scheduled to sing together for a television show, and again when Francis was spotlighted on the TV series This Is Your Life. By the latter's taping, Bobby Darin had married actress Sandra Dee. Francis says she and her father were driving into the Lincoln Tunnel when the radio DJ announced Darin's and Dee's marriage. Her father made a negative comment about Bobby finally being out of their lives. Angered, Francis wrote, she hoped the Hudson River would fill the Lincoln Tunnel, killing both herself and her father; she later wrote that not marrying Darin was the biggest mistake of her life.
Stardom
After the failure of her first nine demos, MGM was about to drop her. She considered a career in medicine. At what was to have been her final recording session for MGM she recorded a cover version of the 1923 song Who's Sorry Now?, which had been written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. Francis has said that she recorded it at the suggestion of her father, who convinced her it stood a chance of becoming a hit because it was a song adults already knew and that teenagers would dance to if it had a contemporary arrangement.
The gamble paid off. On January 1, 1958, the song debuted on Dick Clark's American Bandstand. By mid-year, over a million copies had been sold, and Francis was suddenly launched into worldwide stardom. In April 1958, Who's Sorry Now reached number one on the UK Singles Chart and number four in the USA. This was followed by many other hits over the next decade, as Connie Francis became one of the most popular vocalists in the world.
As Francis explains at each of her concerts, she began searching for a new hit immediately after the success of Who's Sorry Now?. Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield sang every ballad they had written for her. After a few hours, Francis began writing in her diary while the songwriters played the last of their ballads. Afterward, Francis told them that she considered their ballads too intellectual for the young generation. Greenfield suggested that Sedaka sing a song they had written that morning for another girl group. Sedaka protested that Francis would be insulted, but Greenfield said that since she hated all the other songs they had performed, they had nothing to lose. Sedaka played Stupid Cupid. When he finished, Francis announced that he had just played her new hit record. The song reached #14 on the Billboard charts. Incidentally, while Francis was writing in her diary, Sedaka asked her if he could read what she had written. She refused, but Sedaka was inspired to write The Diary, his own first hit single. Through the rest of her early career, Sedaka and Greenfield wrote many of her hits, including Fallin(#30) and Where the Boys Are(#4).
In 1960, Connie Francis became the youngest headliner to sing in Las Vegas,[citation needed] where she would play 28 days a year for nine years. That same year she also became the first female singer to have two consecutive No. 1 singles: Everybody's Somebody's Fool and My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own. By 1967, Francis had 35 U.S. Top 40 hits, three of which were had reached No. 1.
In 1961, she starred in her own television special on ABC television, sponsored by Brylcreem. In Kicking Sound Around, she sang and acted with Tab Hunter, Eddie Foy Jr. and Art Carney. The next year, she appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on July 1, 1962 with the French singing star Johnny Hallyday in a show taped at the famous Moulin Rouge in Paris. Her first autobiography, For Every Young Heart, was released the same year. On July 3, 1963 she played a command performance for Queen Elizabeth II at the Alhambra Theatre in Glasgow, Scotland. During the height of the Vietnam War in 1967, Connie Francis performed for U.S. troops.
Who's Sorry Now
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