Bas Sheva (July 25, 1925 – February 11, 1960), the stage name of Bernice Kanefsky, was an American singer, prominent in the 1950s. Although she began singing Jewish traditional and cantorial music, her career branched out into popular music.
Bas Sheva was born Bernice Kanefsky, to the family of Cantor Joseph Kanefsky of the Crotona Park North section of the Bronx on July 25, 1925. She studied voice with the intent of honoring her family's wishes that she become a cantor. Her voice was extremely powerful and had extraordinary dexterity. However, instead of cantorial music, she decided to move into popular music, adopting the stage name "Bas Sheva", the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the Biblical "Bathsheba". Her career began in the Borscht Belt of New York's Catskill Mountains, performing for audiences of Jewish vacationers. Her recording career began around 1950 with a small number of obscure singles of standard hits, none of which sparked much commercial interest.
In 1953 Bas Sheva was engaged by bandleader Hal Mooney as the principal singer for the album "Soul of a People", a collection of traditional Jewish songs issued by Capitol Records. This disk sold well in the Jewish market, and Bas Sheva's performances of this familiar material contributed much to its success.
In 1954, Les Baxter, a composer and producer at Capitol Records, offered her the role of star vocalist on his suite "The Passions". Bas Sheva's performance on "The Passions" remains startling over 70 years after it was recorded; she screams, wails, whimpers, howls, grunts, and even acts a little to the pulsating rhythms of Baxter's dark, gritty, and complex musical score. Even in an age where musical innovation was beginning to be encouraged, "The Passions" was far too innovative and edgy and the album was not a commercial success. Despite this showcase of the astounding range of her voice, Bas Sheva never recorded again.
Bas Sheva died on February 11, 1960, at the age of 34, as a result of a diabetic reaction suffered while entertaining on board a cruise ship off the sea of South Carolina.
Ofra Haza was an Israeli singer, songwriter and actress, commonly known in the Western world as "the Madonna of the East", or "the Israeli Madonna". Her voice has been described as a "tender" mezzo-soprano. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Haza at number 186 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.
The Jazz Singer is a 1927 American part-talkie musical drama film directed by Alan Crosland and produced by Warner Bros. Pictures. It is the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music and lip-synchronous singing and speech. Its release heralded the commercial ascendance of sound films and effectively marked the end of the silent film era with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, featuring six songs performed by Al Jolson. Based on the 1925 play of the same title by Samson Raphaelson, the plot was adapted from his short story "The Day of Atonement".
Sarah Lois Vaughan was an American jazz singer and pianist. Nicknamed "Sassy" and "The Divine One", she won two Grammy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, and was nominated for a total of nine Grammy Awards. She was given an NEA Jazz Masters Award in 1989. Critic Scott Yanow wrote that she had "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century".
Judy Holliday was an American actress, comedian and singer.
Leslie Thompson Baxter was an American musician, composer and conductor. After working as an arranger and composer for swing bands, he developed his own style of easy listening music, known as exotica and scored over 250 radio, television and motion pictures numbers.
Salli C. Terri was a singer, arranger, recording artist, and composer. Record audiences still cite Terri's "haunting" vocals, with Hi-Fi Review originally describing her as "a mezzo soprano whose velvet voice and astonishing flexibility has hardly an equal at present."
Melvin Howard Tormé, nicknamed "The Velvet Fog", was an American musician, singer, composer, arranger, drummer, actor, and author. He composed the music for "The Christmas Song" and co-wrote the lyrics with Bob Wells. Tormé won two Grammy Awards and was nominated a total of 14 times.
Margaret Eleanor Whiting was an American popular music and country music singer who gained popularity in the 1940s and 1950s.
Nelson Smock Riddle Jr. was an American arranger, composer, bandleader and orchestrator whose career stretched from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s. He worked with many vocalists at Capitol Records, including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney and Keely Smith. He scored and arranged music for many films and television shows, earning an Academy Award and three Grammy Awards. He found commercial and critical success with a new generation in the 1980s, in a trio of Platinum albums with Linda Ronstadt.
Jo Elizabeth Stafford was an American traditional pop singer, whose career spanned five decades from the late 1930s to the early 1980s. Admired for the purity of her voice, she originally underwent classical training to become an opera singer before following a career in popular music, and by 1955 had achieved more worldwide record sales than any other female artist. Her 1952 song "You Belong to Me" topped the charts in the United States and United Kingdom, becoming the second single to top the UK Singles Chart, and the first by a female artist to do so.
Dinah Shore was an American singer, actress, and television personality, and the chart-topping female vocalist of the 1940s. She rose to prominence as a recording artist during the Big Band era. She achieved even greater success a decade later in television, mainly as the host of a series of variety programs for the Chevrolet automobile company.
Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo, known as Yma Sumac, was a Peruvian-born vocalist, composer, producer, actress and model. She won a Guinness World Record for the Greatest Range of Musical Value in 1956. "Ima sumaq" means "how beautiful" in Quechua. She has also been called Queen of Exotica and is considered a pioneer of world music. Her debut album, Voice of the Xtabay (1950), peaked at number one in the Billboard 200, selling a million of copies in the United States, and its single, "Virgin of the Sun God ", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart, becoming an international success in the 1950s. Albums like Legend of the Sun Virgin (1952), Fuego del Ande (1959) and Mambo! (1955), were other successes.
Wanda LaVonne Jackson is an American singer and songwriter. Since the 1950s, she has recorded and released music in the genres of rock, country and gospel. She was among the first women to have a career in rock and roll, recording a series of 1950s singles that helped give her the nickname "The Queen of Rockabilly". She is also counted among the first female stars in the genre of country music.
Roselea Arbana "Rose" Maddox was an American country singer-songwriter and fiddle player, who was the lead singer with the Maddox Brothers and Rose before a successful solo career. Her musical styles blended hillbilly music, rockabilly and gospel. She was noted for her "reputation as a lusty firebrand", and her "colorful Western costumes"; she was one of the earliest clients of Hollywood tailor, Nathan Turk.
The Jazz Singer is a 1980 American musical drama film directed by Richard Fleischer and produced by Jerry Leider. The film stars Neil Diamond, Laurence Olivier and Lucie Arnaz, and tells the story of a young singer who is torn between tradition and pursuing his dreams as a pop singer. Based on the 1925 play of the same name by Samson Raphaelson, it is the fourth film adaptation, following the 1927 and the 1952 theatrical adaptions, and a 1959 television adaptation.
Classic female blues was an early form of blues music, popular in the 1920s. An amalgam of traditional folk blues and urban theater music, the style is also known as vaudeville blues. Classic blues were performed by female singers accompanied by pianists or small jazz ensembles and were the first blues to be recorded. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and the other singers in this genre were instrumental in spreading the popularity of the blues.
Myrna Joy "Jody" Miller was an American singer, who had commercial success in the genres of country, folk and pop. She was the second female artist to win a country music accolade from the Grammy Awards, which came off the success of her 1965 song "Queen of the House". By blending multiple genres together, Miller's music was considered influential for other music artists.
Yosef "Jo" Amar was a Moroccan-Israeli singer and hazzan, notable for his pioneering of the Mizrahi genre and his influence on many artists such as Zohar Argov, Eyal Golan, Ishai Levi and Oren Hen.
The Passions is an album by Les Baxter featuring vocals by Bas Sheva. It was released in 1954 on the Capitol label. From February through December 1954, it was included in Billboard's chart of the top five Best Selling Specialized High-Fidelity Albums.
Shlomo Simcha Sufrin, better known as Shlomo Simcha is a UK-born Canadian Hasidic Jewish cantor and singer. Shlomo Simcha began his career in a small kollel in Montreal, where he was discovered by a local wedding band leader who brought him onto a project recording a series for children in the Satmar community called Besof Umachol. His work on the series caught the attention of Mendy Werdyger at Aderet Records, who introduced him to producer Sheya Mendlowitz, with whom he would create his first commercial album.
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