Jill Corey

Italian-American,[2] Corey was born in Avonmore, Pennsylvania, a coal mining community about forty miles east of Pittsburgh.[3] Her father, Bernard Speranza, was a coal miner,[4] and she was the youngest of five children. Her mother died when she was four years old.[3]

She was a 1953 graduate of Bell-Avon High School.[5] Corey began singing as an imitator of Carmen Miranda at family gatherings, on amateur shows in grade school, and contralto in the local church choir.[2] At the age of 13, she began to develop her own style. She won first prize at a talent contest sponsored by the Lions Club, which entitled her to sing a song on WAVL in Apollo, Pennsylvania. This got her an offer to have her own program. By the age of 14 she was working seven nights a week, earning $5-$6 a night,[3] with a local orchestra led by Johnny Murphy.[6] By the age of 17 she was a local celebrity talent.[3]

Corey in 2013

At the home of the only owner of a tape recorder in town, with trains going by in the background and no accompaniment, she made a tape recording to demonstrate her singing skills to the outside show business world. The tape came to the attention of Mitch Miller,[3][7] who headed the artists & repertory section at Columbia Records. He normally received over 100 record demos a week, and this one, with a 17-year-old girl and its train background, would not have been likely to gain his attention.[3] He telephoned her in Avonmore, and the next morning she flew to New York to be heard by Miller in a more normal studio setting. Miller had Life Magazine send over reporters and photographers, and had her audition with Arthur Godfrey and Dave Garroway.[2] The Life photographers reenacted her signing a contract with Columbia, and all this happened in a single day, with her headed back to Avonmore that night.[3]

Both Garroway and Godfrey called her, and it was her choice to pick one; she picked Garroway, who took the name Jill Corey out of a telephone book.[8][9][10] Within six weeks the Life article, with a cover picture and seven pages, came out. Jill Corey became the youngest star ever at the Copacabana nightclub,[11] where she was hit on by Frank Sinatra,[2] and had numerous hit records.[12][13] Even so, in May 1956, Billboard described Corey as a performer who "hasn't made it big" despite the amount of publicity she received.[14]

Corey was a regular on the television variety programs Robert Q's Matinee (1950–1956)[15] The Dave Garroway Show (1953–1954),[16][3][17] and the 1958–1959 version of Your Hit Parade.[18][19] She was co-host of Music on Ice, a variety program on NBC (1960).[20]

She also worked on television with Ed Sullivan. In 1956 she became a regular on Johnny Carson's CBS-network comedy-variety show from California.[21] In addition, she had her own syndicated radio and television shows, like The Jill Corey Show hosted by the National Guard Bureau,[22] the Jill Corey Sings radio show,[23] and episodes of "Stop the Music" radio show.[24][25] She also appeared at a Delta Gamma gathering in 1957, where she sang and greeted guests.[26] She is known for her cover of a French song, Let It Be Me, in 1957 for Columbia Records[27] and her 1956 song, Egghead, which focuses on "failed masculinity" of an egghead.[28] In 1959 she starred in a feature-length musical film for Columbia Pictures, entitled Senior Prom, which was co-produced by Moe Howard of The Three Stooges.[9]

A two-CD compilation of her complete singles was released in June 2015 by Jasmin Records.[29]

Corey suspended her career[note 1][30] to marry Pittsburgh Pirates third baseman Don Hoak on December 28, 1961, in Pittsburgh.[30][31] They had a daughter, Clare. Hoak died of a heart attack at age 41 after they had been married eight years.[32] She then resumed her career in New York City.[9]

Following the death of Hoak, she starred in plays on and off Broadway including Annie Get Your Gun, Sweet Charity, and played to a sold out crowd at Carnegie Hall in 1989.[9]

An Associated Press article published in February 1973 pointed out the difficulties that Corey faced in attempting a comeback. "Today I don't know how to audition, how to get people interested in booking me," she said.[33] Determined to succeed, she said, "Somehow, I'm going to find a way to tell people I'm back, and that I want to sing."[33]

Corey died on April 3, 2021, from septic shock[34] in Shadyside Hospital, Shadyside (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, at age 85.[1][10]

• Official website
• Jill Corey at IMDb
• Jill Corey Collection at University of Arizona Libraries