It's hard to envision the stern actor Jack Webb, forever linked to his role as the monotone police sergeant Joe Friday on the 1950s series Dragnet, embracing cool jazz or cutting an easy listening album. Yet the man who created the show and embodied that rigidly controlled character held a lifelong devotion to the genre, releasing multiple recordings and amassing more than 6,000 albums in his personal collection. During his early years he spent countless hours practicing cornet, later marrying sultry voiced torch singer Julie London.
Beyond Dragnet, Webb directed and starred in the Warner Bros. film Pete Kelly's Blues, and his work in other studio pictures prompted the label in the 1950s to issue two albums on its fledgling Warner Bros. Records subsidiary. Rhino Handmade later combined those long-unavailable titles—You're My Girl and Jack Webb Presents Pete Kelly Lets His Hair Down—into a limited-edition CD set titled Just the Tracks, Ma'am: The Warner Bros. Recordings, marking their first appearance together in that format after nearly four decades. On You're My Girl, Webb recited rather than sang the lyrics, among them the Otis Redding classic "Try a Little Tenderness," a track also featured on Golden Throats: The Great Celebrity Sing-Off! alongside performances by non-singing actors such as William Shatner. The companion album, by contrast, contains only instrumentals performed by musicians from the movie's soundtrack, including Dick Cathcart, Eddie Miller, Nick Fatool, Matty Matlock, Moe Schneider, Ray Sherman, Jud de Naut, and George Van Eps.
Born John Randolph Webb in Santa Monica, CA, in 1920, the future performer was raised by his mother and grandmother after his father abandoned the family; asthma and financial struggles marked his childhood. One bright spot came from living near a down-on-his-luck jazz cornetist who eventually gave the boy his instrument, nurturing Webb's early affection for blues and jazz. He and London married in 1947 and had two children, Alisa and Stacey, before divorcing in 1954; she subsequently wed jazz composer and musician Bobby Troup. Webb's three later marriages—to Dorothy Towne from 1955 until 1957, to Jackie Loughery from 1958 to 1964, and to Opal Wright from 1980 onward—ended with his death from a heart attack two years after the final union.
