Vocalist's Showcase Vol. 15 Presenting Songs By :
"WHISPERING" JACK SMITH
POPULAR RADIO FAVORITE (REC 1925-1940)

TRANSFER MADE FROM RARE DISCS.

MIRACLE SOUND FILTERING SYSTEM WAS USED.

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“WHISPERING” JACK SMITH (Born 1898 – Died 1950) was a popular baritone singer in the 1920s and 1930s.  He made a brief come-back in the 1940s. Jack Smith was active on radio, made phonograph records and occasionally appeared in films.

Smith began his professional career in 1915, when he sang with a quartet at a theater in the Bronx. After service in World War I, he got a job in 1918 as a "song plugger".
He was a pianist at a radio station when he got his singing break substituting for a singer who failed to show up. Smith was exclusively on the radio, but beginning in 1925, he began making records.
He also started performing on-stage on the vaudeville circuit.
In 1927, Smith toured England, performing with the Blue Skies Theater Company singing tunes such as "Manhattan" by Rogers and Hart and songs by Gershwin.
Then he returned to New York and went to work for NBC Radio.
He died of a heart attack at the age of 51.

He had a very distinctive style which was a combination of singing and talking in a very "intimate" way using the microphone very effectively as opposed to "belting" the song out.  His "whispering" style of singing was a result of a World War 1 injury from poison gas that kept him from singing at full volume.
He made the "whispering" style popular, and there were a number of imitators.
Smith took to the relatively newly invented microphone, and it was singers like "Whispering" Jack Smith and the early "crooners" who developed the use of this "modern" technology.

This CD preserves the best of his early recordings and his last recording.

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