Imogene Lynn(1922-2003)

One of the sweetest-sounding thrushes of the swing era, as well as one of the prettiest, Imogene Lynn began her performing career in 1940 with Emerson Gill's Bamboo Gardens Orchestra in Cleveland. After two years and including other stints with society bands, she joined the drummer Ray McKinley as featured vocalist and became the first wife of one of the band's key sidemen, the saxophonist and clarinettist Mahlon Clark. Following a brief sojourn with another short-lived big band, that of composer Freddie Slack, her next engagement was with Artie Shaw's Gramercy Five during which time she made her famous RCA recording of "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive". Other hit numbers during the two-year long tenure with Shaw included "Let's Take the Long Way Home", "On the Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe", "It Might As Well Be Spring", "Together" and "Gotta Be This Or That". She also accompanied the band on its wartime tours of military bases, theatres and dance halls. After leaving Shaw in 1945, Imogene had a stint with the orchestra of saxophonist/arranger Dave Matthews on the West Coast and subsequently replaced Virginia Rees as lead female vocalist in the Merrymacs vocal quartet. In 1949, she became a member of The Starlighters (replacing Pauline Byrne).

Striking out on her own, Imogene remained in Hollywood. She was featured in films on and off camera, lent her voice to several of Tex Avery's animated shorts at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and dubbed for non-singing stars: Mona Freeman (Mother Wore Tights (1947), Loretta Young (Mother Is a Freshman (1949)) and Vera Miles (Beau James (1957), including a lovely rendition of "Someone To Watch Over Me"). In between, Imogene made commercials for Dial Soap, appeared on television in The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show (1956) and provided backup vocals for, among others, Nat 'King' Cole, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. Imogene lived the last seventeen years of her life in Lancaster, California, where she died in February 2003 at the age of eighty.