Might have beens

There used to be an easy listening station here in the Providence area. It eventually converted to a talk format, but held on through most of the 90s I think. 

Anyway, among the old records they played was "Amapola", sung by Bob Eberly and Helen O'Connell with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra. It struck me as a very good performance.

Eberly's story is an interesting one, and for him must have been frustrating. When the Dorsey brothers split up, he stayed with Jimmy's band. Tommy would soon enlist a young Frank Sinatra. So could Eberly have been as big a star as Sinatra, with movie roles and his own record label? Maybe. He had a great voice, as heard here with unavoidable pops and hisses. And he was good looking in a slightly androgynous way. 

It wasn't quite to be, though. Mostly it seems to have come down to timing. When he died in 1981 he'd mostly be remembered by Big Band Era diehards. That's quite a sentence, but there are probably worse fates.