Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 55

SCREEN RADIO WEEKLY 7 SfT "'C A- Mtem TO 1IB 6QW TAs the Story of a Girl Who Remembers the TomJom's Beat By William L. Stuart "If they have the spark of a singer, they will find it can't be hidden not even by themselves. It's more than personality because it can't be simulated. "I have a dear friend who sings weU, sometimes beau-tilully. But I have never once offered encouragement in respects to a career as a singer because I know that spatk isn't there.

I could tell my friend to come to New York. I don't, because I know that although some small thing like a few weeks' work might come of it, nothing real would happen. And my friend would be intensely dissatisfied with what would appear to be the insurmountable break of the game. Only to the best is professional singing a joy. To others it is drudgery." "You enjoy singing?" we ask.

"I love it," she says. We nod and she leans forward. "Have I talked too much?" she asks with concern. We shake our head. She smiles, this Lee Wiley.

She 0 "Ml I I says, 1 am mouest aoout everything but my singing. 4, -x Down through the years comas the echo ol the drum to teach Lee Wiley, radio singer, that the great songs are "songs of people. They have life in them." HE GIRL sits there and leans forward with her VP -Mr mum. Lee Wiley, who can get very emphatic about things, gets that way. She puts her chin in her cupped hands again and says more slowly, "I had been in radio five years.

I started in station KVOO in Tulsa, back home. The last two years I spent on my own program and on Paul Whiteman's Music Hall. "Something bad happened during those years. I thought only tricky lyrics and novel new songs meant anything. So I sang only those, really, until I went to Arizona." "You learned there?" She NODS.

"I learned there. You can't do much but learn, you know. You think about yourself and things you've done and things you must do. There is the radio to listen to and a movie to see and your friends to be with. It gives you perspective.

You begin to know that it is not the throb of the tom-tom that counts, but the spirit that makes it throb. You learn that a tom-tom with that spirit is far greater than a symphony without. You know that. "And so," she continues, "I am singing songs now I hadn't known how to sing. They are.

songs of people. They have life in them." "But you still sing songs that are loved." "Yes, I still sing those," she says. She is quiet a minute, frowning slightly. "But the others show whether a person can sing," she says finally. "You either put something in them or you don't.

That makes or break you. "If young singers could only understand that this spirit isn't full-blown at once but is an ever-so-slow development, they would save themselves so many bad moments. They must learn that success isn't instan i ii' Hi) head on one side and her dark eyes half closed and you think, as you look at her, that this young woman's voice can tear the heart out of you with just a simple little song. And you wonder why. Her name is Lee Wiley and she sings for the Columbia Broadcasting System, but those aren't the reasons.

Her family, back there in Oklahoma, has always been chock-full of pretty good singers but that isn't exactly the reason, either. This girl this Lee Wiley has a haunting voice, a timbrous contralto that's sometimes sad and sometimes gay, all according to the songs she sings. And even she hasn't been sure why. We ask her as she sits across from us, her elbows on the desk, her chin in her cupped hands. Her dark lashes drop a little more over her eyes and her full mouth moves as she thinks about it.

She says finally in her husky, quick voice: "I think I know." It started, she says, not with her first appearance in radio, not even with her first song as a child, but long that. "With the drums, perhaps," she says, frowning a bit. "Yes, with the drums. My ancestors were Indians and their tom-toms can break your heart. In a funeral dance they can make you cry, but in a war dance they can make you go mad.

And at a festival they can make you laugh and sing. "It is not the drums themselves that do it. It is what makes them roar with anger or sob with She nods her head and we get it. It's something inside, a spirit that prompts tlie patting, beating fingers of the drummer. And, by the same token, it's something inside that prompts Lee Wiley's voice, a spirit over which she has little control.

"Is that," we ask, "what has helped you in your comeback this summer?" She laughs then, lifting her chin from her hands. "My comeback," she says. "I do not like that. 1 can't think of myself as having really been away." "You weren't on the air for a year," we point out. Again her eyes almost close and her quick, husky vntre "I was ill.

It was not th.it I su'lvly became no good, you see. I went to Arizona. That was good for me, because it was good for that somei'rung in -side my 4 taneous. It comes of perfection ot a hundred small details, then the final measure is decided by the presence or absence of that spirit. It never comes overnight without warning." "But radio," we say, "has been givng over-night recognition to some people with the amateur hours." 1 I 'ft HE shakes her head.

"No." she sys. "Only people who would reach the top anyway go on to anything. And they would go on if they had never heard of the amateur program. Ama-tir w-jnnra yilm tht s'fk should th-t their appearance in the spotlight in only a brief and will be followed by an obscurity as comr l. 'e as t'nt which preceded it..