Mary Mayo

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Mary Mayo Riker Ham (born July 20, 1924 in Statesville , North Carolina , † December 1985 in New York City ) was an American singer in the field of jazz , folk , exotic , easy listening and pop music .

Live and act

Mary Mayo, the daughter of Lois Long and Franklin Riker, both opera singers, attended Statesville High School and then Peace College in Raleigh to study singing at New York's Juilliard School in 1945 . In 1946 she won a talent show, and that summer she performed in a hotel in Montréal . She was then heard on broadcasts on the local radio station WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina . Soon afterwards, talent scouts became aware of the singer with a vocal range of four octaves , about which she said succinctly:

"My voice runs from low A below middle C to A-flat above high C, but it's not something you ever need." .

In 1950 she took for Hi-Tone in a duo with Art Gentry the Delmore Brothers -Song Blues Stay Away from Me up as Mary Mayo & the Riddler the title The Wedding Samba . Down Beat magazine dedicated a cover story to her on June 15, 1951, and Johnny Mercer got her a record deal with Capitol Records , where the 78s A Penny a Kiss, A Penny a Hug / Bring Back the Thrill and the Sammy Cahn songs I Can See You / Dark Is the Night out . Frank Sinatra heard her cover version of Blue Moon and brought her as a guest on his first television show; this was followed by appearances on Cavalcade of Stars (1952) and in the shows of Jackie Gleason (1953), Perry Como and Jack Parr . She then became a member of the Glenn Miller Orchestra, led by Tex Beneke ; During this time she married Al Ham, who worked in the Beneke band as an arranger and bassist.

After the birth of their daughter Lorri, the couple settled in New York City in 1956 , where her husband Al Ham worked as a producer in the Columbia Records music studios . He also worked on the 1965 Paramount production of the B-movie Harlow (directed by Alex Segal ), for which Mayo helped on the score, which was by Ham and Nelson Riddle . In the following years she worked sporadically on other film productions and soundtrack albums of Broadway musicals, u. a. as a session singer for Johnny Mathis and Tony Bennett ; she also sang alongside Don Elliott in the short-lived vocal ensemble The Manhattanaires .

From the late 1950s she played a number of singles for Columbia, but they did not make it into the charts, such as Goodbye Now in a duet with Jerry Vale . Her greatest success was the album Moon Gas ( MGM Records , 1963) recorded with Dick Hyman in the genre of space age pop , which is characterized by Mayo's mostly wordless spherical vocals, Hyman's theremin- like sound images on the Moog synthesizer and the special guitar effects by Vinnie Bell excellent. In 1969 she took part in Duke Ellington's 70th birthday concert at the White House ; Joe Williams and Mayo sang Ellington songs arranged by Gerry Mulligan .

In the 1970s she appeared as a member of the folk group The Hillside Singers , popularized in the United States by the jingle I'd Like to Give the World a Coke . The group had put Ham together to replace The New Seekers from studio musicians, including Mayo and her daughter Lorri. Another successful title was I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing , which the New Seekers released soon after. Two more albums followed by the group with folk standards. In the following years, Mayo appeared on the radio show The Music of Your Life , which mainly offered easy listening music. In the late 1970s, Mayo performed in various New York nightclubs, including a. accompanied by George Shearing . During this time she worked with the composer Loonis McGlohon ( A Child's Christmas and Land of Oz ). Shortly after her death appeared in 1986 under the title Audiophile Time Remembered a recording from 1977, the Mayo for NPR telecast American Popular Song of Alec Wilder had taken.

Whitney Balliett compared her voice to Sarah Vaughan's .

Discographic notes

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Whitney Ballet : American Singers: Twenty-Seven Portraits in Song , New York & Oxford Oxford University Press 1988, ISBN 0195046102 , p. 120.
  2. ↑ 78-Discography: Capitol Records 1000 series
  3. ↑ actually Lois Marie Marsters Ham, (* May 21, 1956), cf. Genealogical information at Kasdorf ( Memento of the original from May 21, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kasdorf.name
  4. ↑ published as Columbia 45 4-41141
  5. ↑ Note at ( Memento of the original from May 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. JazzTimes @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / jazztimes.com
  6. ^ For Nixon, All That Jazz (2010) in The New York Times
  7. ↑ Desmond Stone: Alec Wilder in Spite of Himself: A Life of the Composer , p. 146.
  8. ↑ Information about the album on Worlds Records
personal data
SURNAME Mayo, Mary
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mayo Riker Ham, Mary (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American singer
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Statesville, North Carolina
DATE OF DEATH December 1985
Place of death New York City