Joanie Sommers

Joanie Sommers reached her highest chart position when she released "Johnny Get Angry" in 1962. As her second solo single, it climbed to number seven and remained on the charts for more than eight weeks. Her debut solo effort, the Bye Bye Birdie number "One Boy," entered the listings at number 54 in 1960. Although she kept issuing recordings for the rest of the decade, nothing else matched the peak of her earlier hit. Separate commercial work brought another form of recognition when she performed several Pepsi jingles throughout the 1960s and again twenty years afterward; the title of her later album Come Alive was drawn directly from one of those campaigns.

Born Joan Drost in New York, she was raised in California and performed regularly with school ensembles while completing high school and college. Warner Bros. offered her a contract in 1959 when she turned eighteen, immediately teaming her with Edd Byrnes for a single and giving her a brief part on the television series 77 Sunset Strip, where Byrnes played Kookie. She also supplied vocals for his album tracks "I Don't Dig You" and "Hot Rock." Her own jazz-oriented release, Positively the Most, helped secure steady attention among easy-listening and adult audiences, and both listeners and reviewers have long singled out her 1965 album Softly the Brazilian Sound as one of her strongest collections.

Columbia Records welcomed her in 1966. Among the sides she cut for the label was a treatment of "Alfie," a song also recorded by Cher and Dionne Warwick; although it received less mainstream notice than those versions, it still reached the Top Ten on the easy-listening chart. She further appeared in the television special On the Flip Side, which starred Rick Nelson; its soundtrack includes two renditions of "Try to See It My Way," one performed as a duet with Nelson and the other as a solo by Sommers. With a husband and three children, she gradually withdrew from public view as the 1970s began. Before stepping away she made numerous television appearances on programs hosted by Johnny Carson, Dinah Shore, Dean Martin, Mike Douglas, Bobby Darin, and others. Sommers resumed singing and live performances during the 1980s.