Al Bowlly

Al Bowlly stood as Britain’s foremost vocalist throughout the 1930s, commanding a stylistic breadth matched by no peer except Bing Crosby. An authentically global recording figure, he entered the world in Mozambique to Greek and Lebanese parents, grew up in Johannesburg, and first honed his craft in the mid-1920s as singer with Jimmy Liquime’s dance band across India and Singapore. After cutting his initial sides in Berlin in 1927, he reached London the following year alongside Fred Elizalde’s orchestra. The same season saw “If I Had You” emerge as one of the earliest English jazz-band hits to register strongly in America; by the opening of the 1930s Bowlly had launched an independent career. Over the ensuing three years he laid down more than five hundred titles while working with the bands of Ray Noble and Lew Stone. A 1934 trip to New York alongside Noble brought further acclaim when Glenn Miller assembled a hand-picked ensemble—featuring Claude Thornhill, Charlie Spivak, and Bud Freeman—for their joint appearances.

In the mid-1930s, “Blue Moon,” “Easy to Love,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and “My Melancholy Baby” registered substantial U.S. hits, prompting NBC to grant Bowlly his own radio program and drawing him to Hollywood for The Big Broadcast of 1936, where he shared the screen with Bing Crosby. Returning to England that year, he performed both with his own Radio City Rhythm Makers and with the orchestras of Sydney Lipton, Geraldo, and Ken Johnson. Early in the 1940s he and Jimmy Messini took an act titled Radio Stars with Two Guitars to the London stage; it proved his final project. A German bomb detonated outside his flat claimed his life in 1941. Five decades later the British musical Melancholy Baby toured successfully nationwide.