# Louise Tobin, big-band singer who helped discover Frank Sinatra, dies at 104: Videos, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/12/09/louise-tobin-big-band-singer-who-helped-discover-frank-sinatra-dies-at-104-videos-photos/
- Published: 2022-12-09T00:02:34+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Louise Tobin, a big-band singer of the 1930s and ’40s who urged her then-husband,
trumpet player and orchestra leader Harry James, to hire a promising young man she
heard on the radio, a New Jersey singing waiter named Frank Sinatra, died Nov. 26
at a granddaughter’s home in Carrollton, Tex. She was 104.**

Her biographer Kevin Mooney confirmed the death but did not know the immediate cause.

Ms. Tobin was a husky-throated Texan who began singing professionally in her teens
and had a modestly successful career as a “girl singer,” performing with bands fronted
by Benny Goodman, Will Bradley and Bobby Hackett.

She recorded hits with Goodman, including the standards [“There’ll Be Some Changes Made” ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZzFTQMwNk8)
and [“I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu3UJ-ehlD8)
but quit the group to raise two sons she had with James. “We were more trying to
establish Harry than we were trying to establish me,” she recalled to the Dallas
Morning News.

“I heard this boy singing, and I thought, ‘There’s a fair singer!’ ” she recounted
to jazz historian Will Friedwald. “So I woke Harry and said, ‘Honey, you might want
to hear this kid on the radio. The boy singer on this show sounds pretty good.’ 
That was the end of it, as far as I was concerned.”

James caught the broadcast the next night and went to the club looking for the vocalist
with the creamy voice. “We don’t have a singer,” the manager told him quizzically.“
But we have an emcee who sings a little bit.”

James offered Sinatra, who also was waiting tables, a year-long contract at $75 
a week. Within months, they were recording [“All or Nothing At All”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5EGbTX9Ifo)
and other ballads that established Sinatra not only as a commercial force — he would
soon be lured to Tommy Dorsey’s far more popular band — but also as the preeminent
singer of his generation.

Ms. Tobin’s marriage disintegrated rapidly, a casualty of what she described as 
James’s wandering eye and swelling ego. James, lured to Hollywood to appear in films,
began squiring noted pinup and star of movie musicals Betty Grable, who became his
second wife. As Ms. Tobin’s career ebbed, she returned to North Texas and raised
her children.

Producers gradually enticed her back into the festival circuit, including a 1962
appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, where New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett
praised her for singing “with warmth and a total lack of calculation.” She married
jazz clarinetist Michael “Peanuts” Hucko in 1967 and [performed with him](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ebQgGoFyPg)
for three decades.

Ms. Tobin and her husband, clarinetist Peanuts Hucko, circa 1970. (The Louise Tobin
and Peanuts Hucko Jazz Collection/Texas A&M University at Commerce)

Mary Louise Tobin was born in Aubrey, Tex., on Nov. 11, 1918, and grew up in nearby
Denton, where she was one of 11 siblings raised by her widowed mother. Her father
died because of injuries suffered in a car accident.

Within a few years, she joined a regional band led by Art Hicks that also featured
James as lead trumpeter and that toured movie theaters and hotel ballrooms. She 
and James married in 1935; she was 16, and he was 19.

After their divorce, Ms. Tobin spent several years working in Los Angeles with bands
led by pianist [Emil Coleman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT2qrQLgWB0) and trumpeter
Ziggy Elman before returning to Texas.

Survivors include two sons, Harry James Jr. and Jerin Timothyray “Tim” James; and
many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

With Hucko, who died in 2003, she co-owned the Navarre supper club in Denver and
toured Europe, Australia and Japan as an apostle for the big-band sound. As she 
told the Morning News, “Jazz, it’s freedom.”

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