"White goddesses," declared the American writer, Will Friedwald, in Jazz Singing, "were as essential to the big-band era as brass, reed and rhythm sections. They decorated the fronts of swing bands like the figureheads on a ship, and no bandleader who wanted to fill dance halls, or sell records, dared go on the road without one." But if, by the mid-1930s, there were scores of such performers, there were very few whose musicality made them stand out from the crowd.
Helen Forrest, who has died aged 81, was one. The American composer and musicologist, Gunther Schuller, observed that, until Frank Sinatra came along, she was probably the finest white singer of the swing era.
Forrest worked with the best white orchestras of the 30s and 40s, including Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Harry James. Her wartime hits with the James orchestra defined the mix of morale-boosting bounce and camouflaged intimations of separ- ation and loss that characterised 1940s pop. Her earlier recordings with Artie Shaw included All The Things You Are and Any Old Time, and with Goodman, Taking A Chance On Love and More Than You Know. She was also one of the few performers to bridge the unspoken racial divide between the big bands, recording I Don't Stand A Ghost Of A Chance With You with the black bandleader Lionel Hampton.
Her voice was warm and relaxed, and she sang lyrics as if she was listening to their inner meanings. She was capable of bridging the roles of jazz singer as instrumental voice and jazz singer as solo star, her intonation was excellent, and she could deliver the emotionalism and sentimental material the commercial orchestras sometimes required without tipping into schmaltz.
Widely liked in the music business and by the public, Forrest was nevertheless no pushover. She told even Benny Goodman where to go when she felt his clarinet playing over her vocal lines was more disrespectful than decorative.
Forrest's stock rose sharply in the swing world in 1938, when she replaced Billie Holiday as the singer with Artie Shaw's orchestra, but she had already built a career around New York. She had been born Helen Fogel in Atlantic City, first sang with her brother's band at a dance marathon aged 10, and worked regularly on radio, first for WNEW in New York, then for CBS, with the trumpeter Bunny Berigan.
In 1938, Artie Shaw was also on a roll, and as his star rose, so did the clamour of bookers informing him that fronting a black singer (Billie Holiday) was limiting his appeal. Holiday, in any case, had no desire to record the pop ditties the pluggers forced on the big orchestras. Shaw heard a demo by the 19-year-old Forrest, and she joined the band. It was the period of her career - working with an immense variety of material - in which she acquired most of her expertise and flexibility.
Forrest and Holiday, who got on well, went on the road with the Shaw orchestra, before racial confrontations and abuse finally forced Billie to quit. Forrest recorded 38 singles (many of them skilful performances of forgettable material) for Shaw during 1938, then moved to Benny Goodman's band.
He disliked vocalists, but had more time for Forrest's musicality than his introversion and irascibility allowed him to let on - although her recollection of their 20 months together was that they "felt like 20 years". At the Sherman hotel in Chic- ago in 1941, Forrest finally told Goodman: "This is it. Find another singer, and find her fast." Goodman found a little-known 19-year-old from North Dakota called Peggy Lee.
Forrest said later that she quit "to avoid having a nervous breakdown. Then just on a hunch, I decided to contact Harry James." With James's band, she became a star - and one of the most popular singers in one of the most popular bands of the closing period of the big-band era.
James began building his arrangements around the central pairing of his own soaring trumpet sound and Forrest's lustrous voice. The music became shmaltzier, but from her first vocal - He's 1-A In The Army, And He's A-1 In My Heart - the pairing caught the wartime mood. He's My Guy, That Soldier Of Mine, But Not For Me, Skylark, and many other hits, followed.
Forrest's relationship with James was intimate on and off the stand, but the arrival of Betty Grable when all three were filming Springtime In The Rockies ended it in both locations. The singer began working with Dick Haymes, a James band crooner, and their duets were also highly successful, including Long Ago And Far Away, It Had To Be You and Together.
Forrest appeared in several short musical movies, sang the massive hit, You Made Me Love You, with James in Buckaroo, and took to the supper-club circuit with the waning of the big bands in the early 1950s. But her solo career never really took off.
In 1964 she toured with Sinatra, worked fitfully though the next two decades, releasing a final album, Now And Forever, in 1983. Rheumatoid arthritis eventually affected her vocal cords in the early 1990s. Forrest was married and divorced three times, and is survived by her only son, Michael Forrest Feinman.