Jeri Southern: the jazz star who out-crooned Frank Sinatra
At the Paramount Theatre in New York City sometime in the mid-1950s, Frank Sinatra had one of his few moments of being starstruck. Ol’ Blue Eyes had seen everyone worth seeing by that point: Presidents, fellow entertainment stars, and mobsters, among many others. But when Sinatra was informed that Jeri Southern was having a drink with the other singer on the bill, June Hutton, and getting ready to leave, he made a beeline for her.
“June just freaked out and said, ‘No! You can’t leave yet. If Frank knows that you were here and didn’t meet you, he’d really be upset,'” Southern’s manager Dick LaPalm, who was visiting Sutton with Southern, told the Lincoln Journal Star in 2010. “I thought she was kidding, and so did Jeri.”
“I’ve never seen anyone leap up so fast,” LaPalm added. “He leapt up and came running out and grabbed Jeri. He hugged her so hard I think he was actually hurting her.” LaPalm claims that Sinatra told Southern that she is “just the best, the very best” before adding: “‘And no one should record ‘Dancing On The Ceiling’ after what you’ve done with it.'”
So, who was this person that could turn Frank Sinatra into a fanboy? Born in Royal, Nebraska, Jeri Southern was a piano prodigy who soon learned to harness the power of her unique voice. Southern was one of the key figures in blending traditional pop and jazz worlds, bringing a delicate sensibility to swinging uptempo numbers and heartfelt ballads of the 1950s. She recorded no less than 12 albums in just over six years, including five in 1958.
Southern was capable of singing with large orchestras or in stripped-back settings, like the trio she assembled to record 1954’s Warm Intimate Songs in the Jeri Southern Style. She was both a singles artist and an album hitmaker, releasing most of her work through Decca Records before jumping ship over to Capitol in the late 1950s. However, Southern brought her career to an unexpected end as the 1960s rolled around. After a 1962 promo for the US Navy, Southern never recorded or performed again.
“The day she decided to stop performing was one of the greatest days in both our lives,” Southern’s only child Kathryn King told The Lincoln Journal Star. “An enormous relief for both of us.” According to King, Southern suffered from “a paralyzing case of performance anxiety. Just contemplating performing made her enormously anxious and depressed.”
“For years she battled her fears, however, because people loved her singing, and I think she felt a responsibility to use the musical gift she’d been given,” King added. “But eventually the weight of anxiety about it was just too great. Once she allowed herself to quit, it truly liberated her. At a certain point you have to ask yourself, ‘How long am I going to put myself through this?'”
Southern may have been more prescient than she knew. Just as she retired, British rock and roll groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were making Southern’s big band jazz-pop style obsolete. Only the strongest figures, like Sinatra, were able to survive. For someone who never seemed to want massive stardom in the first place, Southern got out of the game just before a major shift in popular culture likely would have forced her out anyway.
Southern was a piano teacher and musical educator for the rest of her life. In 1978, she wrote her own scorebook, Interpreting Popular Music at the Keyboard. She continued to compose, teach, and occasionally play piano, but she never again sang on recordings. She was considering a possible return to singing when she died unexpectedly in 1991, just one day before her 65th birthday. For figures like Sinatra, Southern’s voice was one that would always be remembered.
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