Gladys Swarthout

Gladys Swarthout earned her primary reputation through classical singing yet ventured at times into lighter popular material. She entered the world in Deepwater, Missouri, as the child of a railroad conductor and grew up there alongside at least one other musically gifted sibling. Both she and her sister Romah Lee received vocal instruction during childhood, with Gladys attracting notice for the power and breadth of her voice. While still in her early teens she claimed to be nineteen and secured a post as contralto soloist at a Kansas City church.

Her training remained centered almost entirely on classical repertoire. After studying at the Bush Conservatory of Music in Chicago she entered the Chicago Civic Opera Company, where Mary Garden became an influential guide. The Metropolitan Opera later engaged her, and she made her first appearance on its stage in 1929, performing the role of La Cieca in La Gioconda. Throughout the 1930s she maintained a steady presence on radio broadcasts and continued performing on opera stages while also taking parts in several motion pictures.

Paramount Pictures placed her under contract during the middle of that decade, resulting in roles in five feature films that included Rose of the Rancho and Champagne Waltz. Her recorded work extended past operatic literature to embrace songs by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and Richard Rodgers; for RCA Victor she released at least one 78-rpm album devoted to standards drawn from those writers. Professional activity persisted into the early 1950s, allowing a few television appearances, one of which was a guest spot on What’s My Line.

As she entered her fifties, complications arising from childhood rheumatic heart fever that had gone undiagnosed began to impair her health. Retirement became necessary, yet she survived through then-novel open-heart surgical methods. During the final ten years of her life she focused much of her energy on educating parents about the risks of rheumatic heart fever in children. She died in 1969 at the age of sixty-eight.