Bea Wain, big band vocalist, dies at 100

Bea WainBEA WAIN, 100, of congestive heart failure on August 17 in Beverly Hills, Calif. Started singing on the radio at the age of 6, became a hit-making vocalist in the late 1930s, and performed into her ninth decade as one of the last survivors of prominence from the Big Band era. Among her biggest hits with the Larry Clinton Orchestra were “My Reverie,” “Deep Purple,” “Heart and Soul,” and “Martha (Ah! So Pure).”

She went on to a solo career on the college and theater circuit and became a regular on Your Hit Parade radio show. She and her husband Andre Baruch co-hosted radio talk shows in New York City and Palm Beach, Florida before settling in Beverly Hills, California.

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Lew Shaw started writing about music as the publicist for the famous Berkshire Music Barn in the 1960s. He joined the West Coast Rag in 1989 and has been a guiding light to this paper through the two name changes since then as we grew to become The Syncopated Times.  47 of his profiles of today's top musicians are collected in Jazz Beat: Notes on Classic Jazz. Volume two, Jazz Beat Encore: More Notes on Classic Jazz contains 43 more! Lew taps his extensive network of connections and friends throughout the traditional jazz world to bring us his Jazz Jottings column every month.

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