User:Mleaning/Harry Prime

Harry Prime is a Big Band vocalist who performed from the late forties through the mid-fifties.

Prime was a featured vocalist with the orchestras of Randy Brooks, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Fina and Ralph Flanagan.

research notes

• recorded nearly 100 songs

• recorded "Until," a million-seller with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.
• 1948 Until

http://www.trombone-usa.com/dorsey_tommy.htm

http://www.jazz-on-line.com/Tommy_Dorsey.htm

Tommy Dorsey And His Orchestra Until (1948) RCA, 20-3061

• so he was with Tommy Dorsey from 1944 to at least 1948?
• the philly.com article says Jimmy Dorsey

• He was making $200 a week in 1945 on CBS Radio's Music That Satisfies

• 1950 Ralph Flanagan Orchestra

• 1950 Billboard poll of the nation's disc jockeys rated his band, the Ralph Flanagan Orchestra, No. 1 in the country.

• 1944. Prime was 24, newly married, and heading for the post office in Washington, where the night shift awaited. His trolley passed the 400 Club. The marquee announced an amateur-night contest.

He wasn't a trained singer, but he'd sung all his life, first with his mother, who would chirp the old songs as she laundered the family clothes, then in church.

• Prime performed so well that the club offered him a week's engagement. At the end, the owner told him if he went back to the post office, he'd be a fool. Once Prime made the change, his salary jumped from $42 to $50 a week.

The club owner knew what he had. He sent Prime to a nearby recording studio to sing with a blind accordion player. They laid down "I'll Get By" and "Long Ago and Far Away." And when the club owner heard the acetate, he called bandleader Jimmy Dorsey in New York and played him the record over the phone.

Days later Prime was headed for Florida in a borrowed suit. Dorsey hired him to travel with his musicians, learn the songbook, and wait until their male vocalist - a drug addict - hit the skids.

Prime's time came four weeks later, with two minutes' notice, at Manhattan's Hotel Pennsylvania. The show was going to be broadcast on radio. "Are you ready to sing?" Dorsey asked him.

In the crowd that night sat a big-time DJ, Martin Block, who invited Prime to stop by his office the next day. Waiting for him were several execs from the cigarette company that made Chesterfields and sponsored the show.

Prime was signed for a 13-week engagement, for four times as much as he'd ever earned. Chesterfield marketed him as something out of Horatio Alger, from rags to riches.

External links

• Big Band Vocalist, Harry Prime
• Daniel Rubin: At 90, big-band singer Harry Prime gets another encore