Desmond, Dale and Cornell Promote Their Wares

Alan Dale, Don Cornell and Johnny Desmond

Coral Records had three fine crooners on the rolls in 1953, and so decided to merge their talents and hopefully their audiences by having them record the 1926 Ben Ryan chestnut, "(The Gang that Sang) Heart of My Heart." Probably responding to the publisher's stimulus, Decca (which owned Coral) had the Four Aces do the same, and the two versions battled it out on the airways and record charts. Jack Pleis provided the orchestral backing on both records.

The three Coral artists were Alan Dale, Don Cornell and Johnny Desmond, who despite the Anglo names were all of Italian descent, being baptized Aldo Sigismondi, Luigi Francisco Varlaro and Giovanni Alfredo De Simone.

Coral decided it had to do something different to promote the record to disc jockeys, so it prepared two promotional tracks, one by the trio and one by labelmate Eileen Barton that DJs could program to intro the cut. The trio's cut is amusing, but Barton sounds ill at ease.

These promos were on one side of the 78; the other was devoted to touting the flip side of the commercial 78, "I Think I'll Fall in Love Today," an good new song by the duo of Robert Allen and Al Stillman.

The "I Think I'll Fall in Love Today" promo was a complicated bit in which the DJs were to engage in rhythmic colloquy with the trio. The promo record went so far as to have Eileen Barton provide an example of how this was to be done. Honestly, I wonder if anyone actually used this contrived bit.

Eileen Barton

The combination of two or more top artists on one record was becoming more common in 1953 and 1954, although the phenomenon was not new. Typically it involved female-male combinations such as Jo Stafford with Frankie Laine or Gordon MacRae, or Margaret Whiting with MacRae or Jimmy Wakely. Same-sex couplings were less common, although there were pairings of Lisa Kirk with Fran Warren, and Rosemary Clooney with Marlene Dietrich, among others.

A June 1954 Billboard article (in the download) notes the phenomenon, mentioning Dale-Cornell-Desmond along with Dale-Desmond-Buddy Greco, and a quartet encompassing Jane Russell, Della Russell, Connie Haines and Beryl Davis. The latter contingent had some sticking power. Jane, Connie and Beryl recorded a gospel LP for Capitol in 1957 called The Magic of Believing. The following year Coral issued a record called Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord by the four of them, with Rhonda Fleming replacing Della Russell on some songs. The Coral LP was largely a repackaging of earlier single releases.

The download includes both the promo record and the commercial release of the Dale-Cornell-Desmond materials.