Jill Corey

Jill Corey (born Norma Jean Speranza; September 30, 1935 – April 3, 2021) was an American popular standards singer. She was discovered and signed on one day when she was 17. She went on to have her own radio shows and to star in a feature film.

Italian-American, Corey was born in Avonmore, Pennsylvania, a coal mining community about forty miles east of Pittsburgh. Her father, Bernard Speranza, was a coal miner, and she was the youngest of five children. Her mother died when she was four years old.

She was a 1953 graduate of Bell-Avon High School. Corey began singing as an imitator of Carmen Miranda at family gatherings, on amateur shows in grade school, and contralto in the local church choir. At the age of 13, she began to develop her own style. She won first prize at a talent contest sponsored by the Lions Club, which entitled her to sing a song on WAVL in Apollo, Pennsylvania. This got her an offer to have her own program. By the age of 14 she was working seven nights a week, earning $5-$6 a night, with a local orchestra led by Johnny Murphy. By the age of 17 she was a local celebrity talent.

At the home of the only owner of a tape recorder in town, with trains going by in the background and no accompaniment, she made a tape recording to demonstrate her singing skills to the outside show business world. The tape came to the attention of Mitch Miller, who headed the artists & repertory section at Columbia Records. He normally received over 100 record demos a week, and this one, with a 17-year-old girl and its train background, would not have been likely to gain his attention. He telephoned her in Avonmore, and the next morning she flew to New York to be heard by Miller in a more normal studio setting. Miller had Life Magazine send over reporters and photographers, and had her audition with Arthur Godfrey and Dave Garroway. The Life photographers reenacted her signing a contract with Columbia, and all this happened in a single day, with her headed back to Avonmore that night.

Both Garroway and Godfrey called her, and it was her choice to pick one; she picked Garroway, who took the name Jill Corey out of a telephone book. Within six weeks the Life article, with a cover picture and seven pages, came out. Jill Corey became the youngest star ever at the Copacabana nightclub, where she was hit on by Frank Sinatra, and had numerous hit records. Even so, in May 1956, Billboard described Corey as a performer who "hasn't made it big" despite the amount of publicity she received.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.