Val Rosing
Val Rosing is the British vocalist who sang on the original 1930s 78rpm recordings of "The Teddy Bears Picnic," "Try A Little Tenderness” and more than a hundred other songs on labels such as Columbia, Decca and Rex. He was a member of many of Britain’s top Dance bands, including the Henry Hall Orchestra, Jack Payne's BBC Dance Orchestra, the Ray Noble Orchestra, as well as his own swing combo, the Radio Rhythm Rascals.
Imagine being the first singer ever to record “Try A Little Tenderness!” Indeed, Rosing had a keen ear for material, and great songs seemed to find him. But despite his remarkable success in the 1930s, due to a set of strange circumstances, he is largely forgotten.
In 1937, Rosing landed a role in a British film, “Feather Your Nest.” And this is where the story gets more interesting. MGM honcho Louis B Mayer saw a clip of Rosing from the film, and brought Rosing to America. Mayer dubbed him Gilbert Russell in an effort to make him the "English Bing Crosby." (Just recently, a friend sent us a 1938 recording of the Maxwell House Hour with Fanny Brice, Robert Taylor and Mayer personally introducing Rosing as Gilbert Russell for the first time.)
Though he never became one of MGM’s big stars, he did adopt Gilbert Russell as his name, America as his home, and became a "legitimate" singer and actor, performing light opera and musical theater on Broadway, with tour companies, and the radio in the 40s and 50s. He became close friends with people like Meredith Wilson. During the 1960s he became one of Hollywood's top vocal coaches with students such as George Chikiris, Shirley Jones, Louise Sorrel, Florence Hendersen, Tina Louise, Natalie Wood, etc.
For a few decades, Rosing’s name faded from recognition, but his music has certainly not. Children and parents the world over still enjoy his performance of A Teddy Bear’s Picnic, and in 2005, the Rosing/Hall recording of Teddy Bears Picnic was used for the inaugural Microsoft xBox commercial. His recording of Hush Hush Hush, Here Comes The Boogeyman was used in the 2000 film Jeepers Creepers, as well as the hit video game Biosphere 2.
In 2010, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, Radio Rhythm Records released "Try A Little Tenderness," a compilation of 24 of his most cherished recordings, with selections from the many different combos and orchestras he performed with.
More than 90 years after he sang them, our label frequently fields requests to license Rosing's performances in commercials, movies and TV. Most recently he can be heard in episode 2, season 3 of Killing Eve.
Music runs in Rosing's family: His father was Vladmir Rosing, the great Russian opera tenor who also came to the US, was a director at the Eastman School, and put on opera shows at the Hollywood Bowl and staged operas for and with soldiers at Camp Roberts, an Army base in California. Indeed, by the 1950s Russell had retrained his voice to be deep and operatic, following in his father's footsteps as a "legitimate" singer.
Rosing/Russell met his second wife, Marilyn Pendry on stage at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles in a production of the “Song of Norway”. She was a dancer in movies like "White Christmas," "An American in Paris" and TV shows like “The Jimmy Durante Show.” They had a child, Claudia.
Claudia Russell, the subject of this website, is a professional singer/songwriter on the folk festoival and coffehouse circuit, born with the family gift - unusually emotive singing ability. Claudia is as American as her father British, and 50 years younger, so the styles are somewhat different, but by chance, they recorded one song in common: Home On the Range.
As Claudia tells it, her family had no idea about her father's early career. It was not until Ray Pallett, a British fan journalist put two an two together that Claudia heard her father's work. "Now I know where my voice comes from. No wonder I am drawn to swing music."