Margaret Whiting

Margaret Whiting rose to prominence as a leading pop vocalist throughout the 1940s and 1950s, delivering a bright, incisive tone together with an air of guileless charm perfectly suited to such numbers as “It Might as Well Be Spring” and “Moonlight in Vermont.” Born the daughter of songwriter Richard Whiting—her aunt, Margaret Young, having already cut sides for Brunswick Records in the 1930s—she sang from early childhood and, by the age of seven, had begun working alongside Johnny Mercer, the celebrated tunesmith and Capitol Records founder who employed her father. When Mercer and his partners started the label, Whiting became one of its initial roster signings.

She cut her first sides for Capitol in 1942; her breakthrough arrived with the Mercer–Harold Arlen song “That Old Black Magic,” which she recorded as featured vocalist with Freddie Slack & His Orchestra. Further successes followed in 1943 when she appeared with Billy Butterfield’s Orchestra on “Moonlight in Vermont” and with Paul Weston & His Orchestra on “It Might as Well Be Spring,” the latter drawn from the film musical State Fair. Late in 1945 she began recording under her own name, scoring a hit the next spring with the Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein II composition “All Through the Day,” which appeared alongside “In Love in Vain” in the motion picture Centennial Summer.

Additional chart entries came from the Broadway scores St. Louis Woman and Call Me Mister in 1946. Those initial solo sessions took place in New York; by late that year Whiting had returned to California, where she worked with Jerry Gray & His Orchestra on the best-sellers “Guilty” and “Oh, But I Do.” Her run of hits persisted through 1948 and 1949. Because of a nationwide musicians’ strike, instrumental tracks were laid down abroad and vocals overdubbed stateside; under those conditions she supplied the voice for Frank De Vol & His Orchestra’s “A Tree in the Meadow,” a number-one single recorded in London during the summer of 1948. Her second chart-topper arrived the following year with “Slipping Around,” one of several duets she made with country film star Jimmy Wakely. That same year she also paired with Mercer on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

In 1950 she reached the charts once more with the novelty “Blind Date,” cut with Bob Hope and the Billy May Orchestra. She remained with Capitol until the mid-1950s, when her string of successes ended. A move to Dot Records in 1958 yielded only a single hit; she then joined Verve Records in 1960 and made several albums, one of them with jazz singer Mel Tormé. After a short return to Capitol she stepped away from recording until signing with London Records in 1966, the label for which she released her final two pop-chart singles. Her work continued to appear on easy-listening surveys into the 1970s. Active as a performer and recording artist into the early 1990s, Whiting died at the Actors’ Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, on 10 January 2011 at the age of eighty-six.