Buddy Clark

Biography

Buddy Clark (July 26, 1911 - October 1, 1949) was a popular singer in the 1930s and 1940s. Clark was born Samuel Goldberg to Jewish parents in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He made his Big Band singing debut in 1934 with Benny Goodman on the Let's Dance radio program. In 1936 he started to perform on the show, Your Hit Parade, and lasted until 1938. In the mid-1930s he signed with Vocalion Records, having a top-20 hit with "Spring Is Here". He did not have another hit until the late 1940s, but con...

Buddy Clark (July 26, 1911 - October 1, 1949) was a popular singer in the 1930s and 1940s.

Clark was born Samuel Goldberg to Jewish parents in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He made his Big Band singing debut in 1934 with Benny Goodman on the Let's Dance radio program. In 1936 he started to perform on the show, Your Hit Parade, and lasted until 1938. In the mid-1930s he signed with Vocalion Records, having a top-20 hit with "Spring Is Here". He did not have another hit until the late 1940s, but continued recording, appearing in movies, and dubbing other actors' voices.

In 1946 he signed with Columbia Records and scored his biggest hit with the song "Linda" recorded in November of that year, but hitting its peak in the following spring. Linda was written especially for the six-year-old daughter of a show business lawyer named Lee Eastman, whose client, song-writer Jack Lawrence, wrote the song at Lee’s request. Upon reaching adulthood and becoming famous as a photographer, Linda was, for a while, something of a musician, later became a prominent spokeswoman for vegetarianism and animal rights, and broke a generation of teenage girls' hearts when she married Beatle Paul McCartney.[citation needed]

1947 also saw hits for Clark with such titles as "How Are Things in Glocca Mora" (from the musical Finian's Rainbow), which made the Top Ten, "Peg O' My Heart", "An Apple Blossom Wedding", and "I'll Dance at Your Wedding". The following year he had another major hit with "Love Somebody" (a duet with Doris Day, selling a million and reaching #1 on the charts) and nine more chart hits, and extended his success into 1949 with a number of hits, both solo and duetting with Day and Dinah Shore. He was fatally injured in a private plane crash in Los Angeles, returning from a college football game, when the craft ran low on fuel and crash-landed on Beverly Boulevard. A month after his death, his recording of "A Dreamer's Holiday" hit the charts.

Buddy Clark and five other friends had rented a small plane to attend a Stanford vs. Michigan football game. After the game on the way back to Los Angeles, the plane developed engine problem, due to lack of gas, and lost altitude and crashed on Beverly Boulevard, in California. Clark didn't survive the crash. At that time, he was 38 years old reaching new heights of popularity, when tragedy struck. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.