Tucker learnt saxophone as a child and led his first band at university where he was studying medicine.

In the mid-1930s his band had become a name around St Louis and gained national attention in 1937 with Down Beat describing it as “the perfect hotel combination.”

Part of Tucker’s popularity came from his ability to put on a good show. He built a series of boxes for his musicians that featured lighted notes of different shapes and colors for different sections that would flash accordingly during each song.

For the band’s stein song he used a set of three-sided mugs on which were painted, in fluorescent paint, the name of the town or venue in which they were playing. Such gimmicks quickly helped make the orchestra’s name.

WEE BONNIE BAKER

Wee Bonnie Baker was recommended to Tucker by Louis Armstrong. She joined the band in 1936.

In August 1939, Baker recorded “Oh, Johnny, Oh, Johnny, Oh!” with the Tucker Orchestra. It sold over half-a-million copies and put Tucker and Baker into the national spotlight by year’s end.

Baker’s cute singing style proved wildly popular, and she became the star of the band, with equal billing to Tucker.

The Tucker Orchestra also featured a male vocal trio, The Bodyguards.

Tucker and Baker announced their engagement in fall 1940, though it likely was just a publicity stunt. The two never married, and in interviews Baker typically insisted that she had no romantic interest in Tucker.

In January 1942, Tucker shook up his whole vocal department, releasing everyone, including Baker, who had decided to go solo.

Billboard reported that Tucker had hired Lorraine Benson, an Arkansas girl as Baker’s replacement, with Bob Haymes, brother of the more famous Dick, became male vocalist.

Wee Bonnie Baker sang with the USO (United Service Organizations) during World War II, and appeared regularly on the radio show Your Hit Parade.

In 1948, she recorded a novelty song, “That’s All Folks!,” as a duet with Mel Blanc playing the character Porky Pig. She also voiced the cartoon character Chilly Willy in the 1950s.

She released an album, Oh Johnny!, with orchestra conducted by Wilbur Hatch, on Warner Bros Records in 1956.

After moving to Florida in 1958, she continued to sing in clubs with her husband Bill Gailey, who performed as Billy Rogers; the two often performed with Chuck Cabot and His Orchestra.

She gave up performing after suffering a heart attack in 1965.

In 1976, she was a switchboard operator at a Ft. Lauderdale medical centre.

Orrin Tucker joined the Navy in May, with a reporting date in July. He planned to leave the band intact while he was away, offering Baker the job of leading it in his absence, but she turned him down.

Tucker also offered movie singer Phil Regan the job, but he declined as well.

By mid-June, Tucker was still looking for a way to keep his band going, but in the end he had to disband. Benson remained vocalist until the end.

Given the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade, Tucker led the band on the navy’s 1943 radio program Ahoy America, broadcast from the Navy Pier in Chicago and also featuring singer Mary Ann Mercer.

Released from the service in mid-1945, he put together a new civilian orchestra which began working the Midwest.

Singer, Scottee Marsh, joined the band as was female vocalist in April 1946.

Marsh fronted the band that summer when Tucker spent several weeks in the hospital with a fever.

You’ll hear her with the band in a broadcast from 1951 on this week’s Phantom Dancer.

Without a recording contract in 1947, Tucker’s band dropped off the public’s radar. He recorded two sides each for Universal and Mercury in 1948, with the Bodyguards as vocalists, and one side for the London label in 1949, but his music by that point was somewhat old-fashioned, and the recordings went nowhere.

Tucker was never able to recapture the fame he’d had before the war, though he continued working steadily on the hotel circuit for many years, broadcasting on radio.

He left music because of health problems during the 1990s.

Orrin Tucker lived to be 100 and died in 2011.

His radio theme was ‘Drifting and Dreaming’.