A new book written by Ken Crossland and Malcolm Macfarlane, authors of Perry Como: A Biography and Complete Career Record, is a long overdue examination of the jazz career of Rosemary Clooney which began in the mid-1940s and ebbed and flowed as she became famous as an actress and battled personal demons but resumed from the late-1970s onwards. Late Life Jazz: The Life and Career of Rosemary Clooney charts the manner the singer “changed and adapted her singing style, moving from a singer of trite ditties to a peerless interpreter of the Great American Songbook,” according to the book’s publishers. Crossland and Malcolm Macfarlane’s book draws on contemporary sources and interviews with family members and music industry figures. The singer, who died in 2002, published her autobiography This for Remembrance: the Autobiography of Rosemary Clooney, an Irish-American Singer in 1977, followed late in her life with a second, the confessional Girl Singer: An Autobiography.
Late Life Jazz is published in the UK by Oxford University Press on 29 August