Biography
Georgia Gibbs appeared regularly on the charts throughout the early 1950s, yet her adaptability across styles kept her from establishing the lasting impact achieved by numerous contemporaries. She handled ballads, straight pop, novelties, pop-jazz and cha-chas with equal ease, shifting to meet whatever the market demanded. Like many other white pop vocalists in the mid-'50s, she recorded covers of R&B successes aimed at mainstream listeners. Today she is chiefly recalled for outselling Etta James on a version of “The Wallflower” retitled “Dance with Me Henry” and LaVern Baker on “Tweedle Dee,” although that period of her work proved short-lived.
Gibbs started performing in Boston ballrooms while still a teenager and issued her first recordings in 1938 under her birth name, Fredda Gibson. In the early ’40s she cut sides with Artie Shaw’s orchestra, and by the early ’50s she had produced several hits for the Coral label. Her strongest commercial run came on Mercury, where she delivered a steady stream of successes between 1951 and 1956. The tango-tinged “Kiss of Fire” reached the top of the charts in 1952 and stands as the biggest and most enduring of those releases. Her polished pop interpretations of “Tweedle Dee,” issued late in 1954, and “Dance with Me Henry,” which followed in early 1955, remain the recordings for which she is most widely known, and with justification: although Mercury chose the material, the covers diminished attention paid to the more robust originals at a moment when rock & roll was still fighting for acceptance in the pop mainstream.
After 1955 Gibbs never returned to the Top 20. She departed Mercury soon afterward, in part because her A&R directors Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore had also left the company. A short, unsuccessful stay at RCA followed, after which she scored her final Top 40 entry, “The Hula Hoop Song,” on Roulette in 1958. She greatly reduced her professional schedule during the 1960s but continued performing to a limited extent in later decades until complications from leukemia ended her life on December 9, 2006, at the age of 87.
Gibbs started performing in Boston ballrooms while still a teenager and issued her first recordings in 1938 under her birth name, Fredda Gibson. In the early ’40s she cut sides with Artie Shaw’s orchestra, and by the early ’50s she had produced several hits for the Coral label. Her strongest commercial run came on Mercury, where she delivered a steady stream of successes between 1951 and 1956. The tango-tinged “Kiss of Fire” reached the top of the charts in 1952 and stands as the biggest and most enduring of those releases. Her polished pop interpretations of “Tweedle Dee,” issued late in 1954, and “Dance with Me Henry,” which followed in early 1955, remain the recordings for which she is most widely known, and with justification: although Mercury chose the material, the covers diminished attention paid to the more robust originals at a moment when rock & roll was still fighting for acceptance in the pop mainstream.
After 1955 Gibbs never returned to the Top 20. She departed Mercury soon afterward, in part because her A&R directors Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore had also left the company. A short, unsuccessful stay at RCA followed, after which she scored her final Top 40 entry, “The Hula Hoop Song,” on Roulette in 1958. She greatly reduced her professional schedule during the 1960s but continued performing to a limited extent in later decades until complications from leukemia ended her life on December 9, 2006, at the age of 87.
Albums
Live On The Ed Sullivan Show 1949-1960
2023
Georgia Gibbs: Rare Recordings of a Timeless Voice
2023
Call Me Georgia Gibbs
2016
The Kiss of Fire
2008
The Best Of Georgia Gibbs: The Mercury Years
1996
Something's Gotta Give
1964
Live
