29 March 2022

Buddy Clark Dies in Air Crash – Phantom Dancer 29 March 2022

Greg Poppleton's Phantom Dancer swing jazz radio show

Buddy Clark is this week’s Phantom Dancer feature artist. Singer with the Benny Goodman Let’s Dance show orchestra that popularised swing, he was also ‘The Contented Singer’ for Carnation Milk.

The Phantom Dancer is your weekly non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV every week.

LISTEN to this week’s Phantom Dancer mix (online after 2pm AEST, Tuesday 29 March) and two years of Phantom Dancer mixes online at, at https://2ser.com/phantom-dancer/

Also, there’s a couple of 1931-32 Gogo DeLys radio vocals on this week’s show. Hear The Phantom Dancer Gogo DeLys special and read her story here

LINDA MACCARTNEY

Here’s Buddy Clark singing ‘Linda’ written by Jack Lawrence, inspired by 6 year old Linda MacCartney…

BUDDY CLARK

Buddy Clark, as a young boy, sang as often as he could at gatherings, and in what today’s times would be called “joints”, local pubs, where the floors of the local pubs and bar rooms were covered with sawdust.

He was singing at a local wedding in Boston when he was heard by David Lilienthal, a proprietor of Boston’s leading furriers, I.J. Fox.

Changing his name to Buddy Clark, Buddy became a protégé of Lilienthal who arranged music lessons for him and started him off on a professional career as a band vocalist and radio star.

He sang for nine years on a Boston radio show sponsored by I.J. Fox –  made two evening broadcasts and sang six days a week on morning shows.

In 1934 he made his big band singing debut career in earnest as a vocalist with the Benny Goodman band on the “Let’s Dance” radio show. Buddy was billed on several other top radio shows including the “Hit Parade” from 1936-1939.

He sang uncredited on radio transcription discs for the big bands of Fred Rich, Archie Blyer, Freddy Martin, Lud Gluskin and Nat Brandywynne.

In fact, Buddy Clark’s renown as a “ghost singer” was such that film producer Darryl F. Zanuck hired him to do the singing for actor Jack Haley in “Wake Up and Live”, a 1937 movie about a popular radio singer who gets “Mike Fright”.

The Hollywood welcome mat was now laid down for Buddy. He was offered his own radio show called, “Here’s to Romance” and he even played a small cameo role in the 1942 film “Seven Days Leave’ which starred two of Hollywood’s leading stars, Lucille Ball and Victor Mature. He also sang for actor Mark Stevens in the musical hit “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now”.

Buddy made scores of hit records many of them with Xavier Cugat’s orchestra. The balding Clark who didn’t care whether he lost his hair or not earned the title of the “Contented Crooner”, partly because of his radio sponsor on the “Carnation Contented” program, and also because of his appeal to the bobby-sox fans.

During World War II, while in the US army, Buddy sang with many of the military bands until his discharge in 1945, in which he resumed his career, earning over a $100,000 a year, equivalent to millions today.

In 1946 he signed with Columbia Records and scored his biggest hit with the song “Linda” recorded in November of that year, but hitting its peak in the following spring. “Linda” was written especially for the six-year-old daughter of a show business lawyer named Lee Eastman, whose client, songwriter Jack Lawrence, wrote the song at Lee’s request.

1947 also saw hits for Clark with such titles as “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” (from the musical Finian’s Rainbow), which made the Top Ten, “Peg O’ My Heart“, “An Apple Blossom Wedding”, and “I’ll Dance at Your Wedding”.^[3] The following year he had another major hit with “Love Somebody” (a duet with Doris Day, selling a million and reaching #1 on the charts) and nine more chart hits, and extended his success into 1949 with a number of hits, both solo and duetting with Day and Dinah Shore. A month after his death, his recording of “A Dreamer’s Holiday” hit the charts.

PLANE CRASH

On Saturday, October 1, 1949, hours after the 37-year-old had completed a Club Fifteen broadcast on CBS Radio with The Andrews Sisters—subbing for ailing host Dick Haymes—Clark joined five friends in renting a small plane to attend a University of Michigan vs. Stanford University college football game in Stanford, California. On the way back to Los Angeles after the game, the plane ran out of fuel, lost altitude, and crashed on Beverly Boulevard in West Los Angeles. Clark did not survive the crash. Clark’s last radio broadcast found him in very high spirits, clowning with Maxene, LaVerne, and Patty Andrews. He joined them for a comical rendition of “Baby Face,” during which Buddy amused the CBS studio audience, as well as the famous swing trio of sisters, with his spot-on Al Jolson impression

His one daughter with second wife, Nedra Stevens, Penelope, died in 1950 age 6, as a result of being hit by a car as she ran across the street to meet her governess. Penny was a ‘little friend’ of Clark Gable, the Clark’s next-door neighbor, who often shared ‘little tea’ with his young neighbor.

29 MARCH PLAY LIST