Big-band vocalist "Liltin'" Martha Tilton achieved peak visibility across the two years she spent as a featured singer with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. Her contribution to the band's chart-topping treatment of the swing standard "And the Angels Sing" brought widespread attention, while her appearance also marked the first time a non-classical singer had taken the stage at Carnegie Hall. Born November 14, 1915, in Corpus Christi, TX, she passed most of her teenage years in Los Angeles, where she began performing on the side with bandleader Sid Lippman for the radio program Coconut Grove while still attending high school. Three years with the Hal Grayson Band came next, after which she entered the vocal group Three Hits and a Miss in 1936. The following year she moved to the Jimmy Dorsey Band and took a role as a lounge singer in the enduring film comedy Topper.
Goodman soon reached Hollywood to shoot the picture Hollywood Hotel and to hold tryouts for a replacement for departing singer Helen Ward; within days of securing the position, Tilton set off on the road with the ensemble and remained away from Los Angeles for the next two years. Praised for her crystalline tone and direct approach to phrasing, she stood out during the Goodman Orchestra's historic January 16, 1938, concert at New York's Carnegie Hall—the first occasion on which a swing ensemble had been granted such a platform. Her reading of "Loch Lomond" drew the longest applause of the night, and her profile rose still higher through the 1939 Johnny Mercer song "And the Angels Sing," the most successful of the roughly eighty titles she recorded with Goodman.
After Goodman disbanded the orchestra in April 1939, Tilton moved to bandleader Paul Whiteman's NBC radio series backed by Philco. In the early 1940s she briefly hosted her own program, Liltin' Martha Tilton Time, on the same network. Amid the well-known ASCAP strike she cut her initial solo sides for Standard Transcriptions, then joined the new Capitol Records roster in 1942. Subsequent singles such as "I'll Walk Alone," "A Fine Romance," and "I'll Remember April" appeared, and throughout World War II she remained a regular on the USO circuit, accompanying headliner Jack Benny to bases across both the Atlantic and Pacific. Following the close of her Capitol contract in 1949 she worked with smaller imprints including Coral and Crown; meanwhile, she and singer Curt Massey co-hosted a daily fifteen-minute syndicated radio program underwritten by Alka-Seltzer for seven years.
In 1955 Tilton portrayed herself in the screen biography The Benny Goodman Story, reenacting her part in the Carnegie Hall concert. She also welcomed her third child that year and thereafter withdrew from public view to devote herself to family life. Years afterward she reappeared in swing-revival packages, among them a mid-1980s Australian tour presented as a Goodman tribute under the direction of pianist/arranger Al Lerner. Natural causes claimed her life at her Brentwood, CA, residence on December 8, 2006; she was ninety-one.
