Dinah Shore

Dinah Shore was one of the defining solo voices of the big-band era, and the first female singer of her generation to build a major career outside a bandleader’s billing. After failed auditions with Benny Goodman and both Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, she struck out alone, cutting her first sides with Xavier Cugat’s orchestra in 1939.

By the mid-1940s she had a run of enormous hits — “Buttons and Bows,” “The Gypsy” and “I’ll Walk Alone” among them — several holding the top of the Hit Parade for a month or more. Her recording career, roughly 200 singles across RCA Victor and then Columbia, ran in parallel with a hugely successful move into television, most famously The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, whose closing jingle “See the USA in Your Chevrolet” became one of the most recognisable pieces of 1950s American advertising.

Her catalogue offers real depth for a collector prepared to track it by era and label rather than chase a single defining record — 78 rpm box sets from the 1940s through 10-inch and 12-inch LPs into the 1960s, spanning torch songs, show tunes and blues-inflected pop across a four-decade career that only slowed with her death in 1994.