Doris Day is this week’s Phantom Dancer feature artist and opens an all vinyl Phantom Dancer today – your non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-50s radio with Greg Poppleton.

The Phantom Dancer produced and presented by 1920s-30s singer and actor Greg Poppleton can be heard online from 12:05pm AEDST Tuesday 17 March at https://2ser.com/phantom-dancer/

This week’s all vinyl Phantom Dancer also has Fats Waller on 23 September 1943 radio, a set of Dizzy Gillespie on 1950s radio and live Trad Bands including Eddie Condon and George Wettling. See the play list below

Doris Day

RADIO

Doris Day was born Doris Mary Kappelhoff in 1922.

She began her career as a big band singer with Barney Rapp and his New Englanders in 1939, which is where we’ll first hear her in a broadcast over NBC from Cincinnati.

She reached commercial success in 1945 with two No. 1 recordings, ‘Sentimental Journey’ and ‘My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time’ with Les Brown and his Band of Renown. We’ll also hear from live airchecks with Les Brown from that period.

She left Brown to embark on a solo career and recorded more than 650 songs from 1947 to 1967.

In 2011 at age 89, she released her 29th studio album My Heart which contained new material and became a UK Top 10 album and #12 on the Amazon bestseller list.

Doris Day and dance act partner Jerry, 1937

MOVIES

Day’s film career began with the film Romance on the High Seas (1948), leading to a 20-year career as a motion picture actress.

She starred in film musicals, comedies and dramas.

She played the title role in Calamity Jane (1953) and starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) with James Stewart. Her best-known films are those in which she co-starred with Rock Hudson including 1959’s Pillow Talk, for which she was nominated an Academy Award for Best Actress.

She worked with James Garner on both Move Over, Darling (1963) and The Thrill of It All (1963), and also starred with Clark Gable, Cary Grant, James Cagney, David Niven, Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Richard Widmark, Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall and Rod Taylor.

TV

She became one of the biggest film stars in the early 1960s and ended her movie career in 1968. She then moved to TV, starring in the sitcom The Doris Day Show (1968–1973) during and after which she starred in TV specials.

AWARDS

She received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a Legend Award from the Society of Singers. In 1960, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and was given the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures in 1989. In 2004, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom; this was followed in 2011 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Career Achievement Award.

ACTIVIST DAY

In 1971, Doris Day co-founded Actors and Others for Animals, and appeared in a series of newspaper advertisements denouncing the wearing of fur, alongside Mary Tyler Moore, Angie Dickinson and Jayne Meadows.

In 1978, Day founded the Doris Day Pet Foundation, now the Doris Day Animal Foundation (DDAF). A non-profit charity, DDAF funds other non-profit causes throughout the US that share DDAF’s mission of helping animals and the people who love them.

To complement the Doris Day Animal Foundation, Day formed the Doris Day Animal League (DDAL) in 1987, a national non-profit citizen’s lobbying organisation whose mission is to reduce pain and suffering and protect animals through legislative initiatives.

Day actively lobbied the United States Congress in support of legislation designed to safeguard animal welfare on a number of occasions and in 1995 she originated the annual Spay Day USA. The DDAL merged into The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) in 2006. The HSUS now manages World Spay Day, the annual one-day spay/neuter event that Day originated.

A facility bearing her name, the Doris Day Horse Rescue and Adoption Center, which helps abused and neglected horses, opened in 2011 in Murchison, Texas, on the grounds of an animal sanctuary started by her late friend, author Cleveland Amory. Day contributed $250,000 towards the founding of the center.

Day was a vegetarian.

VIDEO

This week’s Phantom Dancer video of the week is a 1964 interview with Doris Day by Lucille Ball. Enjoy!

17 MARCH PLAY LIST