Ruby Murray

One remarkable stretch of chart history saw a vocalist place five brand-new singles inside Britain’s Top 20 simultaneously, accounting for a full quarter of the listings then limited to twenty positions. These were fresh releases rather than recycled catalogue tracks or opportunistic re-pressings, and the artist responsible was Ruby Murray during the week of March 17, 1955, an era still dominated by ballads and novelty numbers before rock & roll reached the general public.

Born in Belfast on March 29, 1935, Murray was noticed by producer Richard Afton while touring Northern Ireland as a juvenile variety performer. Afton urged her toward professional entertainment, and she made her first television appearance at twelve even though child-performer regulations curtailed her schedule until she reached fourteen. She later joined Tommy Morgan’s touring revue and, after Joan Regan departed, took a regular vocal slot on the BBC series Quite Contrary. Columbia offered her a contract, and her initial success arrived with the ballad “Heartbeat,” which climbed into the Top Ten by late 1954; it was swiftly followed by her sole number-one hit, “Softly Softly.”

Throughout the opening months of 1955 further Columbia releases entered the lists, so that “Happy Days and Lonely Nights,” “Let Me Go, Lover,” and “If Anyone Finds This, I Love You” joined her earlier two titles, creating the five simultaneous entries that week in March. Each of those records ultimately reached the Top Ten. Two additional 1955 singles, “Evermore” and “I’ll Come When You Call,” also charted before the unstoppable rise of rock & roll at year’s end displaced artists of Murray’s gentle, unthreatening style.

In the mid-fifties she broadened her work with a solo television series, a London Palladium engagement in Painting the Town alongside Norman Wisdom, and a screen appearance in A Touch of the Sun with Frankie Howerd and Dennis Price. While performing a summer season in Blackpool she met and married Bernie Burgess of the vocal group the Jones Boys. Two minor later entries, “Real Love” and “Goodbye Jimmy Goodbye,” brought her chart career to a close near the decade’s end. After that marriage ended she wed Ray Lemar and made her home in Torquay, Devon.

Decades of nostalgia later revived interest in her clear enunciation and the vanished style she represented. EMI assembled her hits for the 1989 EMI Years collection, which featured such signature standards as “Mr. Wonderful,” “Scarlet Ribbons,” and “It’s the Irish in Me”; the label followed with The Magic of Ruby Murray in 1997 and the triple-CD Anthology: The Golden Anniversary Collection in 2005, marking fifty years since her chart peak. Marie Jones’s biographical play Ruby premiered in Belfast in 2000. Murray continued cabaret and nostalgia performances until her death from liver cancer on December 17, 1996, following a period of illness.