American singer and actress Connie Francis died on July 16th in a Deerfield Beach, Florida hospital. She was 87. Born Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero in Newark, New Jersey on December 12, 1937. She was encouraged by her father to appear regularly at talent contests, pageants, and other neighborhood festivities as a child singing and playing the accordion. She began her recording career in 1955 with little success. Francis considered a career in medicine and was about to accept a four-year scholarship offered at New York University. At what was to have been her final recording session for MGM on October 2, 1957, with Joe Lipman and his orchestra, she recorded a cover version of the 1923 song "Who's Sorry Now?" Francis has said that she recorded it at the insistence of her father, who was convinced it stood a chance of becoming a hit because it was a song adults already knew and that teenagers would dance to if it had a contemporary arrangement. The single seemed to go unnoticed like all previous releases, just as Francis had predicted, but on January 1, 1958, it debuted on Dick Clark's American Bandstand. On February 15 of that same year, Francis performed it on the first episode of ‘The Saturday Night Beechnut Show’, also hosted by Clark. By mid-year, over a million copies had been sold, and Francis was suddenly launched into worldwide stardom. By the end of the 1960s, The Beatles had tallied 30 top 10 hits, while Presley had 22, and the Supremes had 18, the outlet noted. However, Francis remained the top among solo women with 10. Connie Francis sold over 40 million records before she was 25. Francis was the singing voice of Jayne Mansfield in the 1958 Euro-western “The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw” she sang the title song "In the Valley of Love".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk_tPMgM_7Q&list=RDSk_tPMgM_7Q&start_radio=1
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